


even iron can put forth

by mysticalmuddle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ADWD spoilers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Cousin Incest, Dark Jon Snow (But He Gets Better), F/M, Families of Choice, Grief/Mourning, R Plus L Equals J
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:53:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 85,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24611077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticalmuddle/pseuds/mysticalmuddle
Summary: After the wars and the winter, Spring has come to creep across the land again. Jon has survived all of it, and he has dragged the whole of the North through it with him, but for one. The lost Princess Arya Stark has not returned to Winterfell.Mourning her absence and seeking to avoid a troublesome contingent of Braavosi diplomats, Jon escapes to Karhold and his distant kin. But Spring is not the only thing that has returned to Westeros; the warm weather stirs up an old grudge that nearly costs Jon his life and deepens the debt between himself and a mysterious archer from the War for the Dawn, one that sends him seeking—but forwhat, Jon doesn’t know.
Relationships: Alys Karstark & Jon Snow, Alys Karstark/Sigorn of Thenn, Jon Snow & Sigorn of Thenn, Jon Snow/Arya Stark
Comments: 144
Kudos: 237
Collections: Jonrya Week: A Dream of Spring





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Almond Blossom_ by D. H. Lawrence. Page diver by StarGlade on pixabay.com. 
> 
> **Warnings:** Jon Snow's canon levels of misogyny and obsessive thoughts, canon-typical violence, under-18 sex, and vague spoilers through ADwDs.
> 
>  **Prompt:** Spring Rebirth/Death

> The memory of her laughter warmed him on the long ride north.  
>  —Jon II, _Game of Thrones_

  


> The almond-tree,  
>  December's bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.
> 
> The almond-tree,  
>  That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake  
>  In supreme bitterness.
> 
> Upon the iron, and upon the steel,  
>  Odd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,  
>  Odd crumbs of melting snow.  
>  —D.H. Lawrence, _Almond Blossom_

  


### Part One: Letters, Lords, and Leaving

AFTER Davos read the letter, he sat and rubbed his eyes for a long minute, hoping the late hour and the cup of wine had changed the words on him. Three years now that he had been reading on his own, with the scribe he commonly used held in reserve only for particularly tricky or important papers, and it would be no shock for him to learn that those three years of letters and numbers and words tumbling around his mind hadn’t scrambled up his brain just yet—just not until right then.

Before he returned to the letter, the soft stars from the pressure of his hands fading, he lit another candle to see it better. And then he read it out loud, slowly, with only the crackling fire to hear him.

It didn’t sound any better than it had read. Dealing with correspondence was not one of his favorite duties as Hand of the King. He ranked it somewhere above corralling troublesome lords as if they were children, and somewhere far below all the useful things Davos did, such as tendering trade deals, helping allot the royal stores of grain and meat and cloth to those who needed it, and actually advising the king on matters of importance.

But it wasn’t a part of his job to make decisions about things like this; Davos only needed to decide what was important enough to reach the king’s own hands and this was something he would be grateful to pass along. Not because he thought the king would react well to it, but because it would mean Davos’ part in the matter was over.

He set the letter aside, rifled through the papers spread across his desk for the ones pertaining to Braavos, gathered them all up carefully, and stood.

The hour _was_ late. The bells had rung to signal the gates were closing, and the candles in the sconces on the wall were burning steadily down. Davos went first to the king’s solar, but without much hope. When he got there, the door was free of guards and no light whispered under the door frame.

Often the king kept hours just as late as Davos did and many were the nights Davos had ferried some papers back and forth and found that tired face bent over the work at his desk. If Davos could have used two or three more Hands he could trust, then the king could have used at least a dozen more copies of himself to put to work—rebuilding a kingdom in the middle of winter was difficult finicky work, and there was no other head to share the weight of the crown.

The king worked late hours, but even a king was just a man, under the mantle and the metal of the crown, and as the middle month of the year approached again, Davos thought him more and more a man instead of the icy bulwark that the Northron lords had placed upon the Winter Throne.

He cracked the door open just to be sure. The room was cold and empty, the fire long burned down. He lingered in the doorway a moment, rubbing the aching ends of his short fingers against his thigh.

Let no man say Davos Seaworth was afraid to say his piece; let no man say Davos Seaworth would set his crew a-sea in the middle of a storm and leave them to flounder. But also, Davos thought, the hour was late and the king wasn’t at his desk. And he would not, Davos knew, have the good sense to be abed. 

He might leave the missive there in the solar, along with the other papers for the king to find in the morning. And he, Davos, could see himself to his own bed where his wife was surely waiting, warm and soft and sleeping, with the candle yet lit so he wouldn’t bark his shin on the bench or crash into the side of the bed when he managed to move himself there.

And he might have managed to set his sense of duty aside, if the letter had ended with any other line. But the letter hadn’t said, _We await a reply on the matter_. It hadn’t said, _Send a raven confirming this at your first opportunity_. It had said, _Being certain you will find this answer satisfactory, we have arranged all matters. Our envoys will reach you in a month’s time_.

If the king was the strong stone walls within which a kingdom was built, then he was only as sturdy as the lords and council that made up the earth under those heavy stones and thick mortar. Davos liked him well and trusted him better; he could not leave the man to falter on unstable ground. 

He gathered up his resolve and went on, up another set of stairs and down a long corridor, empty but for the torches on the wall. The king did not allow guards in this hall and gave good reason; there was nothing here to guard. So it was to the men posted at the end near the stairs, leaning sleepily against the stone walls, that Davos tilted his head at. One was busy yawning and the other offering Davos a heavy nod.

“Late night,” he said to Davos. He shifted his spear to his other hand and shook his fingers loose. “His Grace won’t want to be disturbed this late.”

“The raven tower never seems to sleep,” Davos said back. The papers in his hands crinkled. “The birds never seem to rest, coming in as they do. So why should he?”

The man laughed, his fellow guard now shutting his eyes and tipping his head back. There was nothing to stop Davos now, and he did not want to linger in the hall where the men might see his hesitance. It was no one’s business but his own that even the hall filled Davos with dread; the other chambers the king regularly used were well enough to meet in, but this one set his teeth to grinding and the hair on the back of his neck to standing on end.

These rooms never had firelight flickering under the door, only the faintest glimmer of moonlight ever shaded the threshold. The old rooms for the Lord and his Lady and their children stood empty at all hours, the walls scorched down to the stone and the wooden floors uneasy under the weight of his feet.

This was the door that made him shiver the most, this empty room the king haunted like he was a ghost himself. Not always but now, close to the middle month of the year, nearly every damned night.

Better if he’d taken to touring the crypts than that room, Davos thought. In the crypts, where no bones lay but Stark bones, a man could understand why he felt creepingly unwelcome. But this empty bedroom was another matter.

He knocked at the door.

There was no answer for a long moment, then the king said hoarsely, “Enter.”

Davos swung the door open. There were footprints in the dust on the floor, man and wolf together, and they both turned to look at him from where they stood in the center of the dark empty room. 

The furniture had all been taken away and repurposed, the walls had been scrubbed free of smoke and the floor swept free of ash, and after that it could have been just another room, too damaged to repair until all the ice thawed out. It made Davos more than uneasy; it almost made him afraid.

“Your Grace,” Davos said and bowed. The wolf was quick to give up his study of Davos, seeing it was only the king’s trusted Hand, and turned his face back to the window. But the man still looked over, his mouth a sullen curve.

“Davos,” Jon Snow said. “What keeps you from your bed at this time of night?”

“Work, Your Grace,” Davos said. He gestured with the hand full of papers. “And it’s work that brings me to disturb your own rest.”

Davos, of course, did not consider it restful to stand for an hour in a dark and empty room, but then Davos was not mad.

The king quirked the corner of his mouth up ruefully. They had butted heads over the matter until Davos had given in on the subject; arguing made no difference to the king and only served to make them both ill-tempered and sullen.

“You may have a moment,” the king said. He removed his hand from where it rested on the wolf’s head and gave Davos his full attention. With the light from the moon behind him and only the light of the distant torches to color his face, Jon could have been a haunt himself. The ends of Davos’ short fingers smarted and pricked.

“There’s been a letter,” he said. He’d wound the scroll tight again and his palm sweated a little around it. “Braavos has written back to us.”

“Not good news,” the king said, “else it could have waited ‘til morning.”

He ran a hand over his face, looking older beyond his one-and-twenty years. Davos felt keen sympathy; when he was but one-and-twenty, he had not been in charge of a whole kingdom alone. He had only been second mate on a ship, with a whole crew to help him, and even that had been exhausting enough.

“They’ve gotten the letter then. Have they called for our debt to be paid in full?” the king asked. “Or were the terms we offered enough?” 

The dark smears under his eyes turned his face to a skull. Davos did not want to add to them, as poorly sleeping as Jon already was, but even as Hand of the King he did not have the power to reply to a letter such as this.

“No,” Davos said, then considered. “Yes, in a way. They liked the terms but want ought else. Would you read it? There’s a fire laid in your room.”

He held out the scroll and the king considered. “I can see well enough by moonlight,” Jon said, and took the paper. 

“I’m sure you can,” Davos muttered to himself. Ill news to make the king read it at all, even worse to watch him do it in this room, half a shrine and half a crypt, one Davos was certain would never hold the bones or the body for which it waited.

He rubbed the ends of his short fingers, watching the king read the letter through. Davos knew which line made him go still, standing straighter and more somber than a statue, and which line had him crumpling up the parchment into a tight fist.

His lips were white with how thin he pressed them and his free hand clenched and unclenched slowly. His face was a flat dead mask.

“It is a good proposition,” Davos said, but without much hope. “To strike half the debt for such a small thing? I found the terms fair.”

The king raised his eyes from the ball of parchment to Davos’ face and it was only through several years of friendship with the man that Davos did not stagger back a step under the force of his glare.

“I have no reply to make them,” the king said and took himself from the room, brushing past Davos abruptly. The wolf went at his heels, a beam of silver light as it swept past.

Davos was glad to follow; he let the door shut behind himself, happy to be rid of it. He followed after the king, who stalked down the hall, past the guards, and to the new wing where his own bedchamber was. 

Rage and youth made his steps quick. The king was in his chambers when Davos caught up, but the door was still open, so he knew he was welcome to follow.

“You said yourself that you were concerned about what we owed Braavos,” he said gently as he entered, “and not just to the Iron Bank, but the city as a whole.” 

“The city, yes, and a certain house within it,” the king said. He was crouched by his hearth now, easing the wrinkles out of the paper. Davos hoped he would read it again, but he only shut his eyes a moment and said, “And I am not the only one. I am no Lannister, but my honor demands me that I see it paid.”

“Well this letter speaks of the whole debt,” Davos said. This room was much less chilling, though the small shrines remained. A second washbasin next to the first, dry as a bone, and the grey ribbon coiled next to it, the scorched end tucked under itself and so hidden to the eye. Sleeping furs piled at hand then left untouched by one side of the bed. Room by the fire for another chair. 

Davos swallowed and cast his eyes away from them. “Not just the one the Iron Bank has measured in coins,” he said. “This is a fine chance for us to do something about it. The weight has been hanging over our heads long now. Would it not be fine to see it gone?”

Jon looked up at him and cocked his head a little to the side. The fire put strange shadows on his face. “You know I won’t agree to this,” he said. “What else have you come for, Davos? Speak true before I lose my temper.”

“Perhaps His Grace might turn his attention to the final line,” Davos said and swallowed again. “It was alarming for me to read. You might have, ah, skipped over it.”

“It says the Braavosi will be coming in a month’s time to force my hand,” Jon said.

A fraught subject, a delicate matter. Davos was pleased to see that Jon looked mild now, a calm water that settled over deep and dangerous currents.

“Yes,” he agreed cautiously. “That’s what they wrote.”

“Then we are in agreement,” the king said and turned to feed the paper to the flames.

The edge started to smoke. Davos was not so old that he could not move quickly; he was across the room and reaching to stop the king’s hand, crying, “Your Grace!” as he went. 

Jon stilled himself before Davos could grab his arm. He gave Davos a long look.

“I will not accept these terms,” he said slowly. “And it is no matter writing them back; the hawk will cross them on the same path their boat is taking. What other objections have you?”

“This is not a problem we can pretend will go away,” Davos pressed. The lad was sharp as a sword-edge even now; he thought in ways Davos could not follow. He looked up at Davos with some keen look in his eyes and Davos said nervously, “They are sending—”

“I know what they are sending,” Jon said. “and I cannot well stop them from sending it. They can send whatever they like. It does not mean that I will be here to meet them, nor does it mean that they will have success.” But he stood and turned his back to the fire.

“You’re right about this, though,” he said and wafted the letter. “Better the Greatjon has it as proof when they come. Less arguing that way.”

“The Greatjon,” Davos said and his brows drew together. Lord Umber was a good supporter, a _loud_ supporter, but not a man known for subtlety.

“I thought to have him sit the throne while I am away,” Jon said. He crossed the room and set the paper on his table, next to the water pitcher and the empty basins. He was careful to move the ribbon aside. “Give those here,” and he gestured for the other papers. “More about the Braavosi?”

Davos gave them. “The letters from the Iron Bank, the contract of interests, and a calculation of a repayment that you had Lord Flint compose,” Davos said.

Lord Flint was very concerned about the North’s debts. He and Lord Manderly were friends. Davos thought he might count them to join an appeal to the king if he still refused to think on the matter.

The king added the papers to the first letter. “I’ll show those to the lords tomorrow,” he said peaceably. The earlier agitation was gone; the water had closed over the dragging currents again. “After I announce my departure.”

It was a late hour; Davos’ eyes were like sand and his head was starting to ache. He lost his grasp on his temper at that mild look, the one that said nothing was wrong.

“The Braavosi will arrive in a month’s time!” he said. “You cannot simply up and leave to avoid them and expect that—”

The sudden cold look cut him. Winter’s snow in Spring. Winter’s king was not a man who thawed in peacetime. No, the nearer and nearer the year’s turn got to the middle month, the colder he became, until Davos was certain he was a mummer’s puppet carved from ice. 

It had been so the year before, and the year before that. Davos had learned to plan for it. He wondered bitterly if the Braavosi had done the same.

“I am going to Karhold,” Jon said. The night turned his eyes black, deep and shadowed holes in his face. “Lady Alys has invited me even before the Braavosi decided to pressure us. And you are more than welcome to join me—she thinks you a fine friend.” 

He waited until Davos gave him a nod. “The Greatjon will hold the throne in my absence; he is the only one I trust to tell these Braavosi exactly what I think about being forced to take a bride when I already have one.”

It was no use arguing with madmen. And Jon was not truly mad, only in this matter. 

He was a fine enough king about the rest that his people were willing to give him this one strangeness; he was a good enough leader that Davos could overlook the strangeness of it himself. He was a good enough friend.

“You need tell the lords,” Davos said. “They might not like this much and it is better they hear news that they dislike from your own mouth.” 

There came the quick and clever look that Jon had when he started to think sideways at an issue. Davos puffed out some air and quit rubbing at his fingers. He knew well by now that you could not force a direwolf, and while the king was only a man, he had the same stubbornness in him.

“I will gather them tomorrow. You have my word.” Jon smiled. It was a tired smile, but Davos liked it anyway. The king did not smile enough, in the time before the middle month. 

“Then we shall go to Karhold. I will look into arrangements for it,” Davos said and bowed again, tired himself.

The king offered him a gracious nod, a dismissal, and turned as if Davos was not there, to touch his fingers to the second basin. 

Davos was glad to go; he shivered as he passed from the room into the hall. Seven years the Princess Arya had been missing, and five since the king had been woken by Melisandre the red witch. He had woken undiminished by his death, but with his new life had come a name in his mouth and a new wildness to his eyes. 

Davos had stood by him through the end of one war and the full breadth of another. The changes were not so different between the Jon of then and the Jon of now. He was still a smart, stubborn lad that Davos was glad to count among his friends.

And over time, the madness had not gotten any worse, nor had it abated.

It was, Davos supposed, the best that they could ask for.

JON gathered the lords after breakfast, as soon as the hall was cleared of the smallfolk that ate there every morning. He called them up to sit out of duty, and he didn’t do it with any particular relish to the thought of their reaction to the letter. 

He still well remembered the last time he had read a letter about marriage to a large gathering of men. Jon remembered that especially well; he was not afraid now but he kept Ghost close, lying as he was just under the table.

This time Jon’s hands did not open and close with the desire to fasten themselves around any particular man’s neck, but they were still tight on the scroll as he sat himself in the old stone chair.

The throne.

Jon did not wear a crown. He did not think he needed one, and no lord had dared suggest that Jon replace the crown that had been lost with Robb. Jon’s face was enough, a long Stark face. It was enough to end any question of his place there. And the wolf, of course. So long as Ghost was with him, there could be no doubt as to who Jon was.

He did not keep a court. His household was small, befitting for an unmarried king who had little family left to his name. Davos sat at the dais table to the left of Jon, alongside his cheerful wife Marya Seaworth. 

Beside them was the castellan and beside him soft-spoken Lady Jeyne, who acted as hostess if the party was not too large or too loud or drank too much. She hid behind her veil most of the day and ate in her rooms; her place at the table gave her time to consult with the lords and ladies visiting Winterfell.

And to Jon’s right, the chair he kept empty at all meals but for dinner, the only time Jon consented to have a man to fill it, a different one each night as Lord Eddard Stark had once done. And then Lord Manderly and his good-daughter, and then the maester assigned to Winterfell.

Room might be kept there for other highborn visitors except during times like these, when the lords and ladies of the North descended en-masse upon Winterfell. They were all seated on benches at the first two tables below, broken into little groups by their own squabbles.

Almost two weeks before, they had gathered as a body to hammer out terms they could offer Braavos without starving to death trying to fulfill them. 

So it was to Lord Manderly and Lord Umber and Lord Glover and Lady Mormont’s daughter Lyanna who he addressed, and the other liege lords left after rooting out the Bolton men and fighting through the war, along with two dozen lesser lords and ladies.

“A letter came last night,” he said as they settled themselves on the benches. “Ser Davos received it. A letter from Braavos. I trust you will all remember the missive I sent them, last time we spoke.”

“Aye and if this meeting takes half as bloody long, we’ll be wanting ale!” Greatjon Umber shouted. “Ha, and dinner too!”

“This will not take long at all,” Jon said. Ghost lay close, his head propped on the toe of Jon’s boot. He lay easy; it was Jon’s own fault his mouth was thick with the taste of copper, tangy and furious with the want to bite. “We sent Braavos a beggar’s plea and they’ve answered us well enough.”

He held out his hand, the scroll in his fingers. “Would you hear it?” he asked. “Or would you pass it among yourselves? I want no man—” and he paused. Lady Lyanna’s face was stern and somber, Lady Lightwood looked worn in the morning light, _the woman is important too_ , “—nor woman to be mistaken about what it says.”

“I left my letters in the schoolhouse before you were even a twinkle in your father’s eye,” Lord Harclay rasped from where he sat. “And my own eyes are ill now. Let some man read it to us and be done with it.”

His eyes were ill-looking, a faded pale blue that was starting to wash to white. He’d lost his son to the Red Wedding and his grandson to the War for the Dawn; his house was much depleted. Last Jon knew, his heir was a boy of four, a distant cousin to the lord, and fond of naught but his mother and catching frogs.

“Aye,” Lord Peat said, a small crannogman with a leathery brown face. “And some of us never learned them at all. I ain’t half so old, but damned if I could read it even if I wanted to.”

“I learned my letters well enough,” Lady Lyanna said. She was combed and dressed neatly, roses still in her cheeks from her morning in the yard. “And no man will dare call a Mormont a liar unless he wants to face my axe in the yard. With your permission, Your Grace?”

She stood and bowed. It was her mother that had gone with Lord Reed and five other men to open Jon’s mother’s tomb. It was her sister that had died with Robb at the Twins. He handed the letter over and she stood on the dais, unrolled it, and read in a clear voice, “From the office of the Sealord of Braavos, in accordance of a nine-tenths agreement of Keyholders and Magisters.”

The chatter died. Lord Overton looked as if he might be ill. He clutched at the Flint’s Finger Flint tightly. Lady Bole looked bored, Lady Cerwyn sour. Jon cast his eyes around, looking well at their faces, as Lyanna read on.

_“We have received your message on the topic of your great debt and have devised a solution to it. Your proposal of trade with our great city, of both raw materials and refined goods, over a time of a hundred years and with guarantees to repayment by the Winter Throne is a well-thought and fair one. This much we wish to acknowledge. Braavos has long been a friend to the North and understands the difficulties you find yourself with during this Spring; it would be a poor friend who lets his ally starve to count back coins Braavos does not need._

_“Here are the terms we give you now. Half your debt will be forgiven; the Iron Bank will strike it from their records and allot you a new interest on the remainder of only four percent. Ships, materials, and goods from your kingdom will be let into our harbors with no tariff. The tax of your traders will stand at only one-and-ten percent. The guild-leaders of this city will count your lords as their friends and all esteem shall remain between us.”_

She paused, not by choice, but because the room erupted into shouting and clamor. It was the response Jon had expected. Lords stood, then climbed up onto the benches with their necks craning as if they could read the spidery writing from so far away. Someone, hidden among the rest, let out a scream as if she had been stabbed. Ghost raised his head from Jon’s boot and Jon said to him, quietly, “Easy, wolf. All’s well.”

Lord Manderly was on his feet, red-faced, and he wheezed out at Jon, “One-and-ten percent!” 

From the bench below, Lord Glover demanded, “No tariff?” with tears of astonishment in his eyes, and the long cry from the others turned into one unknowable roar of noise.

Lady Lyanna couldn’t raise her voice above them. Jon was content to let them yell; he was content to let them work up some astonished outrage. The friendly tone of the writing set his teeth to ache and the inside of his cheek with creased deep with tooth-prints.

Finally, the Greatjon stood and shouted out above them all, “Shut up, the fucking lot of you!”

His voice was like to shake dust off the timber beams. They fell quiet and he turned, offered a swaying bow to Lady Lyanna, and said, “Let’s hear what they’ll pry out of us for this bounty of goodwill.”

She had read further down the letter. Her face was pale; she turned towards Jon and he made his jaw unclench. “It is nothing I have not read myself,” he assured her, nodding at her to go on.

_“In return, the price is small. Braavos has many noble houses and born of these houses are many noble daughters, all skilled and beautiful maidens. We ask you take one as your bride and so tie the two lines together as kin and allies now and forevermore.”_

The hall was silent. No man dared speak; they looked first at Lyanna with wide eyes, and then to Jon, who kept his thoughts off his face. His hand was a fist where it rested on his thigh. He could not make his fingers loose.

He bore the staring. He made sure to keep his face calm and still and mild. 

Finally, Lord Peat dared to speak. He said, “The rest, girl.”

_“Of these maidens, one has been selected to be most agreeable to you. She is a woman of great prestige, of a line equal to your own. She is fostered to the eldest House of Braavos and trained therein of all manners of things. You will find her a great beauty with a keen mind, and she will be a boon to your rule and to your House._

_“Being certain you will find this answer satisfactory, we have arranged all other matters. Our envoys will reach you in a month’s time. Valar Dohaeris.”_

She considered the end of the parchment and added, “It is signed by the Sealord, his scribe, three magisters, and some other names I do not know.”

“Keyholders of the Iron Bank,” Jon said patiently. He held out his hand and she placed the scroll back into it, running her eyes over his face as she did. The Mormonts had long been allies of House Stark, standing with them for five thousand long years. 

The Mormonts had stood true when Eddard Stark lost his head, and when Robb Stark had called his banners, and when the North had declared its independence again. They had scoffed at King Stannis when he had tried to force their hand to give him fealty, and had bore up during the Bolton Rebellion and had been pillars of strength and hope during the War of the Dawn.

They stood true in that feeling even now, when the last of the Starks were a Lady Lannister who signed herself as the Lady of the Vale, a bastard son of a Targaryen, and a ghost.

“This is a poor thing to ask of an ally,” Lyanna said to him in a low voice. Her eyes were hot with outrage. “And a worse thing to demand from someone they’d call a friend.”

If Stark blood was filled with ice, Mormont blood ran thick with tree sap and the heavy rage of bears when they were stirred. 

“Aye,” Jon said and nodded her back to her seat. She went, slipping onto the bench between the Greatjon and Lord Glover, her arms crossed over her chest and her jaw set mulishly. He had not planned for her to volunteer to read the letter out, but Jon was glad now that she had. If it came to a vote, Jon knew where Bear Island would stand.

Jon had ruled them four long years, these lords and ladies who sat below and broke now and then into furious murmuring and low outraged cries. They had sent out a beggar’s letter, swallowing their pride long enough to stuff it full of humility, every mark on the page shrieking of meekness.

The Braavosi had sent them back an insult.

Jon cared for his people, and he cared for Winterfell. He was not unfamiliar with his own greed; he cared for the throne and the title, too. But there was something he cared about above all those things.

He had worked so patiently and so long, with a cleverness that had astounded him sometimes, dragged up from so deep as it was. He had worked to preserve what he had, that he might someday—

Jon was a man, but he was also a king. He pushed the thought away. They were his; his people and his castle and his throne and his land; and he would keep them and keep them well if he could

“Your Grace—” Lord Manderly began and Jon held out a hand to quiet him.

“Three years ago,” he said, “we sat in this same hall and you named me King in the North. It was not so long ago, but many things have happened since then. Not all of you were here but those that were bent the knee and pledged their swords to mine.”

“Bear Island remembers!” Lady Lyanna said, loud in the quiet. Her chin was up and her eyes flashing. She looked around herself and added, “And Bear Island remembers those who weren’t so keen to kneel!”

“I’m sure it does,” Jon said. “Bear Island has a long memory, my lady. But this is not about the past, but for this one point. When I was put on this throne, I said to you, my lords and ladies, I would be your king in all things but this. I will not take a bride, not from any Northron House, or Southron. Not from any noble line across the sea. I have a bride already, and I will wed none but her, no matter the years that pass before she is returned to me.”

Lord Manderly sat, slowly. The other lords and ladies were still. Lady Lightfoot had her hand to her eye, a kerchief clutched in it. Jon knew that she had lost her husband and her children to the wars and had named a cousin as her heir, rather than marry again.

“Braavos offers us kind terms,” he said. “They will be good for the North and its people. As a Stark, I cannot argue that. But as a man, I will not be forced to wed. It goes against the laws of the North and it goes against mine own oath. I am a bastard, but I am a bastard who has learned his lesson about oathbreakers.”

He raised his hand slowly, almost as if it went without his permission, to rub the scars on his chest. Lord Harclay took his pause as a chance to rise and demand, “And as a king? You say you as a Stark, and you say you as a man, but what say you as our king?”

His rheumy eyes were hard. Jon stood as well—Harclay was old enough to demand the respect of it. “If it were anyone else who said this, I’d say a king who cannot serve his people well should not be a king. But who will believe me if I said I wanted to leave this throne?” 

Nods around the room. Jon marked them. “I will not do you the dishonor of pretending to ignorance. You lords put me on this throne; if I cannot serve you, I have no doubt you will not suffer me to stay on it. But I have little choice. These men who would be our allies have asked of me the one thing I will not do.”

Jon had ruled them four years now. He knew the lords and ladies; he knew the honor the North had never lost. Jon was made of Stark blood and he knew the pride of the North ran deep. 

“Ha!” the Greatjon said. He levered himself to his feet, his face red. He was clever when he was sober, and smart in odd ways up to a certain point in his drinking. A fine reason to meet in the morning, Jon thought.

“Pretty words from a pretty face!” the Greatjon roared. “And what do they mean, Winter King? That you’ll up and let those foreign cunts and their scheming chase you out of Winterfell? Chase you off the seat no ass has sat in but a Stark’s cold ass, for eight thousand years?”

“I would remember those men that let me put my ass to this seat,” Jon said. He would keep his ass in it if he could; even now he was trying to. And too he would keep the chair next to his empty and waiting. “A king rules under sufferance of his people, Greatjon. And the North has suffered enough.”

“The North knew what you’d give it and what you’d take,” Lord Glover said, rising to his feet. Deepwood Motte had stood against strong the dead, for all its walls were made only of iron and wood. “I put my sword at your feet,” he said, “and your cousin’s before you, and I’d damned well do it again.”

Lady Lightfoot stood and said something in a voice so small they could not hear it. The man beside her took her hand and helped her to stand on the bench and Lord Manderly said, “Please speak louder, my lady.”

“I— oh—,” she said, soft as a dove cooing. And then she swallowed, took in a deep breath, and shouted hoarsely, “No man who follows our gods takes a second wife. Might be those slatterns do in th’ South, but not here! I won’t see it done! Not by my king!”

“Aye,” said the mountain Flint. “And who’s this fucking Sealord who thinks he can bully the Winter King? You show him to me, Your Grace, and I’ll show him what I fucking well think of that!”

That Flint had sat once at the high table in Lord Manderly’s seat, forcing Manderly down a chair, rather than fill the one Jon kept beside him. His face was proud; he’d stood with Jon when Stannis had called men to the Wall.

Davos was standing beside him still. The look was in his face a little, the look that said _The boy is mad_. But mostly he looked impressed, under his resignation. 

Jon looked back at Davos, his hands open and spread. “I’ve consulted the lords,” he said in an undertone as the shouting grew at the benches below them. “What else would you have me do?”

He could see, clear as anything, Davos’ look at him as it turned towards the room. He was still a Southron man, as much as he was learning to love the North the longer he lived there. He missed the sea, Jon thought, but Davos was older now and a part of him must be a little glad to give up the sailing and stay with his children and his wife.

Jon saw it in his now face; Davos thought Jon was not the only mad one. He rolled his eyes at Jon, but there was a smile lurking in the corner of his mouth.

The shouting grew louder. The mountain Flint was up, making to smash his fist over another lord’s head. Lady Lightfoot was shrieking into another lady’s face. The Flint’s Finger Flint was only sitting quietly. Jon marked him, along with Lady Cerwyn, who sat a little apart from the rest and made herself busy glaring up at the dais. 

“Alright, enough!” the Greatjon finally shouted at them all again, wrestling the mountain Flint away, and they quieted down. 

“Your Grace,” the Greatjon said, “we don’t need any charity from Braavos if this is what they’ll have out of it. The North has paid its debts before and the North will damned well do it again. You write them back, right here and now, from the office of the fucking king, by way of his lords and ladies, take your proposal and go fuck yourself with it!”

The lords and ladies cheered him. Not loud enough to shake shields off the wall, if there had been any, but loud enough to fill the hall with the echoing sound of it. 

Jon was glad he’d called the meeting in the morning, not in the evening. The Greatjon was offended by that letter, his eyes hot and dark, and his mouth a snarl. Jon had been lucky in his pack, this time. But he was still glad there was not ale and wine in the mix, that a letter like that might actually get sent.

He wanted the Braavosi to leave him be with all this talk of marriage. To his right, the chair sat empty twice a day and it was a wound to fill it even the once. Jon wanted the talking of marriage to stop, but he did not want to go to war with them.

“I hear you,” he shouted back. “Aye, I hear you well enough. The North is rocky ground, and cold as all hells, but it grows a fine crop of proud people and I’m glad of it. I am glad my men and women will not be cowed by war or winter or by any other means.”

He waited for the noise to die down again. “The middle month of the year is coming,” he said. “And I would go to spend it with my kin. Lady Alys Thenn has ordered me go and she is not a woman I would cross.”

Laughter at that, and the mountain Flint called out, “Pretty Alys! You give her a kiss from me!”

“So the matter stands,” Jon said when it was quiet again. “I cannot leave this throne empty when the Braavosi come. Their ways are strange to us if their men are people who take two wives. Who says one won’t see this fine stone seat and try to fill it? I wouldn’t have it suffer a foreign ass.”

More laughter. The tension was easing between them all now. 

“But I have heard a fine letter of response and I like the writer well. The Greatjon will sit this throne when our friends the Braavosi come, and he’ll treat them to our hospitality, and he’ll tell them plain and well, their noble daughter can marry any man she wishes, any man but me, for I am wed.”

He had taken note of those who did not cheer. Jon still had the eyes of a crow, though it was not treacherous wildlings he looked for these days. To Davos, as Jon made to leave, after pausing briefly to touch the back of the empty chair, he said, “Bring me Lord Manderly, the Flint’s Finger Flint, and Lady Cerwyn. I’ll see them in my solar.”

He had some idea why each of them was unhappy. He’d had problems with all of them before. Lord Manderly was the easiest, for Jon had expected his unease. He came first and it was the work of only a moment to allay his concerns. “Your Grace,” he said even before he sat and Jon looked up from the missive he was drafting and nodded.

“You’ll be wanting to know why you won’t hold the throne in my name,” he said and set aside his pen. It was a fine trick pretending he was busy, then pretending the matter was important enough to need his whole attention. He covered up with his wrist the bristling wolf he had been drawing and looked up.

“I— Yes,” Manderly said. He met Jon’s eyes. He put his chins up. “I do.”

“Then I’ll be plain with it,” Jon said. He respected the man; Jon saw no way he could not. It was Manderly that had saved Rickon from his long exile, and Manderly who strained to keep him alive during the war, and Manderly who had wept and wept, sitting in the crypts with the body after Rickon had died.

“You hold the greatest ties to Braavos,” Jon said. “You deal the most with their traders out of all my lords.”

Manderly narrowed his eyes. “You think I would misrepresent you in this?” he demanded.

“I think you are the best choice to see my will done,” Jon said. 

Ghost was lying by the fire; he opened up those wise red eyes and met Jon’s gaze when Jon looked over. _Trickery, Your Grace?_ those eyes said to Jon. _And with your own sworn packmates. For shame,_ and he licked at his own muzzle as if to take the taste of it from his mouth.

Jon ignored him. He swallowed down his own unease. What did wolves know of trickery? Everything Jon had learned on the matter had come from a dragon’s mouth.

“Let the Braavosi break their ships on the Greatjon’s shore,” Jon said. “Let him be the one to tell them I am not here and I will not consent to a sham wedding.” 

Manderly was clever and keen. His eyes brightened and he rubbed at his own face to try and hide his budding smile.

“You’ll come to them afterwards, my lord,” Jon said, “and it will be you that finds a solution for this matter that keeps me well out of any godswood or sept or however they wed across the sea.”

Lord Manderly worked his mouth a moment, silently, so he would not appear so eager. And then he let his smile out. Jon spoke with him for some minutes more on how the matter might be settled, then dismissed him.

Lord Flint came in next. Jon knew why he was there; Flint’s Finger had suffered during the war when the Iron Islanders had come and it was still recovering. He always had several concerns about trade and the financial health of the North. He had a good eye for figures and he was not ungrateful for the coin Winterfell had loaned him to rebuild his people and his land. 

It was natural he had concerns, never mind that he was on the far western side of the country and so had little to do with Braavos. 

They spoke at length and Jon tried his hardest to ease the man a little, going so far as to reassure him that Lord Manderly would help the Greatjon keep the matter well in hand. Finally, the thin lines around Lord Flint’s eyes went smoother.

“They cannot get blood from a stone,” he said to Jon as he stood and bowed. “And if they be wanting Stark blood from us, we’ll give them stone.”

Jon liked him. They clasped arms before Lord Flint quit the room.

Jon had kept Lady Cerwyn for last. It made her sour at him, and so unbalanced in her temper to have to wait. Jon felt it only fair. He was sour to have to see her at all.

For another lady, he might have stood in respect. Jon always prided himself on the fine manners he had learnt as a child. He often rose for the others, especially Lyanna Mormont as the action always made her smile, but he did not rise then.

Lady Cerwyn entered and curtsied, then settled into her chair and for some long moments arranged her skirts just so before she folded her hands on her lap.

“You put me in a difficult position when you summon me for such things, Your Grace,” she said in her quiet voice. “I cannot raise my voice in your hall without getting crowded out with shouting and booing, yet I am expected to show my face there all the same.”

“I think you’ll find,” Jon said coolly, “you made that difficulty yourself. T’was you that allied yourself and your house with Boltons. After that, it is not my fault that the other lords and ladies do not trust you.”

It was a struggle to keep his face calm, but he would not give her the satisfaction of stirring up his rage.

She returned his mild look with one that could be considered cold, if Jon had not spent long years on the Wall, learning true cold, and longer years in the war, fighting through it. He only waited in silence, unbothered.

“It does not matter,” she finally said, when his silence made it clear he had nothing else to say. “It is better manners to question your king in private anyway. So I will ask, and I will ask _plainly_ , as you are so fond of doing yourself, what do you hope to get out of this beyond angering our allies and the holders of our greatest debt?”

“They offered us terms that do not come around from Braavos once but every hundred years,” she went on, eyes flashing. “Half the debt gone in a single pen stroke? Trade terms that will turn King’s Landing green with jealousy? They have sent us a way for the North to build a future and you still refuse to take them! For what?”

“It is a betrayal,” she hissed. “A betrayal of everything you pretend to stand for, ruling over us as you do.”

“And you would know of betrayal,” Jon said in his mildest tone. “This is why I make you come, my lady. Your counsel is often very wise, unique as you are. You were not the only one to escape my sword after the Boltons fell, but you are the only one brave enough to show your face and not that of your steward’s when you are called to Winterfell.”

She went pale but for two high red spots that burned on her cheeks. Her hands trembled in her lap.

“I thought my reasoning was clear enough,” Jon went on. “You would speak on plainness? Then I ask you plain as well. Would a lady of seven-and-thirty and yet unmarried not understand? I wish to do as you have, to escape a forced marriage to someone I do not love.”

The color was gone from her face now. Lady Cerwyn was a homely woman who ruled her keep only by being the last of her family. In another life, Jon might have felt friendship for her. 

But she had signed the letter from Ramsay and so writ her own warrant. Jon had not put her to death only for the fealty House Cerwyn one swore to House Stark, and for fear of leaving too many Northron keeps empty when the war needed them filled, but that small measure of feeling he had left for the woman did not extend to this.

“You say you have a bride,” Lady Cerwyn said. “A girl long dead, one you yourself have not seen in seven years, and one that you used to call sister.” 

Her disgust was plain in her face. “And we all know how you hope to wed with her, if she is ever found. I knew you as a little green boy, Jon Snow. If I had known then that you would end up like this, I would have helped Lady Catelyn smother you in the cradle.”

“You’ll drive the North to the ground, just as your father drove his own house to ruin over a woman he could not have, yet coveted all the same. They say you are a Stark, but it is your true father I see when I look at you,” she said softly, as if to cut him with it, and started to rise.

“I am a Stark,” Jon agreed. He did not rise himself; he could not find the courtesy for her. “And I am also a Targaryen. Perhaps I even have a touch of their madness. But it does not seem to bother my other lords. I am lucky that my madness came on me so late and so mildly. A king who was truly mad might take your tongue for speaking to him in such a way.”

He picked his pen up and laid it to the parchment. “I believe you can see yourself out,” he said.

She left, closing the door softly behind herself, and Ghost came to lay his head on Jon’s knee. “Aye,” Jon said, stroking the soft fur behind his ears. “We were lucky in most of our pack this time, but not all.”

Those wise red eyes rolled to meet his. They seemed to know what Jon could not bring himself to say; they said it only in the look between them. Wolves might take hounds as a pack, if they were the only animal left in the forest, but they would always long for other wolves.

“Aye,” Jon said, his hand busy on Ghost’s head. 

He did not know if he spoke to wolf or man. He did not know which part of himself he was trying to console. Ghost’s rug by the hearth, made special by a woman in Torrhen’s Square, was large enough for two of Ghost’s kin if one was but a little smaller than the other. There was a second desk next to Jon’s, the candles unlit and wooden top undusted. In the cupboards behind his desk sat a second set of pens and inkpots, and an empty ledger, untouched. 

Ghost’s eyes stayed on his. “Aye,” Jon said again and pet the soft fur just behind his ears. “I know.”

DAVOS was quick to arrange a retinue, and he was smart about the matter. He picked experienced riders used to camping in rough conditions, and all of them were men who spoke little. Jon was well-aware this was a gift to him; it felt like he’d used up a month’s worth of words convincing the lords the day before that his way was the right of it and Braavos need be denied.

The king was not supposed to ride alone, but Jon did not bother with niceties such as that and his retinue did not pretend to care about it. He kept Ghost with him and Longclaw at his hip, and it was enough to satisfy even Davos’ nagging looks.

The road to Karhold was more mud than steady frozen dirt. Everything was thawing rapidly, snow piles and the ground and river ice giving over to clear cold water and rich dark dirt. 

It was not a graceful surrender; the advancing army’s terms were ungentle and the white flags ignored. The way was filthy and the North was ugly with the business of Spring.

The deep snows of the mountain ranges were the last to melt, and the further North they travelled, skirting the base of the range that birthed the Weeping Water and the Last River, the more mud there was to be had.

Jon kept his attention on the road when he actually rode upon it. It was a difficult way to take, steering his horse through the deep pits and washed out hillocks. Once or twice he had to go back and warn the men they need diverge to the south or north where the road had completely washed away, and he ended the day tired, his eyes rough from looking and seeing and his body aching and saddle-sore.

It was good.

Ghost did not have the luck of going forward on horseback, well above the worst of the mess. He had resigned himself. He was brown from his shoulders down to his feet and bared his teeth when anyone dare laugh at him.

It was rough work for all of them, riding and hunting and making and breaking the primitive camp. There was nothing else to occupy Jon’s mind; these duties were work for the body, not for the mind. There were no matters to dwell on, no problems he need solve. But he did not think more for it. He thought less.

Such moods came upon him sometimes now, where everything he did seemed distant and far away. His father, the man who had spilled the seed to make him, had been prone to melancholy and Jon wondered if he was as well. 

Ghost was good company for it, these strange solemn moods. He didn’t begrudge Jon his own silences, and it was novel to them both, to ride with little regard for others and to look about at the strange business of a land trying to bring itself back to life.

He did not think much on the mess he had left behind. It did not matter what the Braavosi did when they came to Winterfell. Jon was gone and did not intend to come back until the matter was settled. It had been his biggest concern, and when he thought on it, the feasting and the strange foreign clothes and the woman who would come with her eyes anything but grey, the whole thing seemed as far away as ice was to the Dornish. 

Here in the mountains, with the matters well out of his hands, it was easy to put from his mind.

T’was strange, having space and silence and time where nothing was needed from him but those small tasks his hands knew how to do without his brain telling them. T’was strange to be out from Winterfell when he had spent so long within its walls and the lands just around it. It was like a muscle used too much and cramping from the strain. Some small part of him, a piece that belonged to the man and not to the king, was unwinding itself and stretching in the cool air.

He did not mind being saddle-sore and tired, nor sleeping on the ground in a reeking snoring pile of other men, or even the having nought to eat but tough winter hares and waybread. Jon was used to rough ways of living, for all but the first fourteen years of his life. 

No, all he might want for was a little company, another horse beside his on the road, and on the deer-paths. Someone to ride wild next to him, to mock the birdsong as best she could, to tumble off her horse and insist on investigating a likely patch of wildflowers.

He could not have it. Once Jon had used the memory of her laughter to keep him warm as he left all he knew behind. Even that had turned bitter with age. It hurt to think about; it hurt to touch upon. Now there was nothing to defend himself with when the ends of the winter wind came rushing towards the mountainsides to join the last of the clinging snow.

If Ghost felt lonely, not just alone, he kept it to himself. Sometimes there was distant singing, the thin weak voices of lesser wolves, and he did not even bother to stop and tip his head back and open his mouth in a silent cry. His red eyes looked towards the sound with only contempt.

So it was Jon by himself that noted the gasping puffing breaths of the land trying to warm itself. It was interesting, but not dramatic. Mostly there was mud and long stretches of damp rock and scree, paired with fading patches of snowmelt lingering under the heavy tree cover and deep brush, like white patches on a piebald horse.

Winterfell itself had been washed with flowers, a thousand thousand slumbering seeds burst into greenness and frantic with blooming. But this far North, the frost was slow to give ground, coughing up soft soil in quarter inches. Only the hardiest of trees and the least cautious of the ground plants dared set out more than a few fragile green buds, new leaves trembling in the long winds that swept up from the plains and broke themselves on the rough hills.

It was five days from Karhold by Jon’s count when they crested a ridge and saw the distant swath of deep green kissing the horizon. Karhold’s forests, almost as old and deep as the Wolfswood around Winterfell. By the end of the day’s riding the last of the highlands would fall away under them and they could ford the Last River in the morning, giving the horses the long day of sun to dry themselves in. 

It was he and Ghost who saw it first by virtue of their fast travelling, taking as they did the thin deer-paths that went north into the hills above the road. Jon should have gone back to tell the party and let them make ready if they needed, but the wind came whispering over them, stirred with the scent of green things and water, and the sun was warm across their backs.

He felt the keen weight of the bowl of the sky above him, as blue as sapphires and twice as precious. Jon carried that weight alone, and he resented it, and he was grateful for it. He did not think he could bear to have company.

If there was any time for madness to be forgiven, for selfishness to be overlooked, for care and carefulness to be cast aside, it was Spring. Jon urged his horse onward and Ghost followed after them, swift and silent on the rocky ground.

The ridge was almost all scree on its far side. Jon dismounted and took the horse’s bridle to lead it and when they were on flat land again, consigned himself to riding in the bit of lowlands there where the grass was taking root again and the earth was less pitted.

The deer had agreed, or some of the wild rams that scattered themselves across the slopes as Jon approached. There was a path already wearing down the soft new grass, wide enough to pass a horse on, and a wolf as big as a pony if the wolf followed just behind.

The hills ran parallel to his way now, long slopes that followed his progress as Jon let the horse rest and got his boots filthy with mud and dark brown dust. He was mounting again, his foot in the stirrup and his eyes ahead, not truly looking, not truly thinking, when he saw it.

Color splashed across the green and grey and brown. A scattering of yellow, a smatter of red. Blue that seemed to have fallen from the sky itself and landed dizzily in the dirt to live with the rest of the earth-bound creatures who scrabbled there.

It crept down the hillside, that scattered tangle of color, and Jon put heel to his horse’s side, wanting to see better.

It was wildflowers, of course. Spread out like the train on a heavy gown, the flared sleeve of some Southron lady. His was not a mouth made for smiling, but it crept up a little at the corner at the wild spread of color there. He turned his head a moment, his hand reaching to point it out, and caught himself in time just before he did.

The wind swept up and over them, the scent of the thawing earth and the new grass thick in the air, and it cut through his cloak and his clothes. It cut down deep, cold to his bones.

The flowers seemed less like jewels now. Jon thought that all, just a glimpse of the glory waiting at the end of the filthy work, when he passed the hill by and saw the far side of it.

It wasn’t quite a valley and it wasn’t quite a wash, but the land dipped low between the first hill and the next at the perfect angle to catch the full breadth of a day’s sun. Through happenstance or luck it was bright now with that sunlight and thick with flowers, a woven cloth of a thousand riotous colors, the sort a good witch in a fairy story would wear.

Lousewort and fireweed and harebell, crowfoot and spearwort and puffs of thrift and a dozen other flowers Jon could not name, all of them struggled up from the rich dark earth and nodding in the same stiff wind that had Jon blinking wetly and Ghost folding his ears back.

Ghost stood at the edge of the field, his fur rustling with the wind, and turned his muzzle to it to better smell the land. Jon reined up his horse, who shifted and bowed his head to crop the stubby grass, and he let the reins lie as he swung himself from the horse’s back.

There were a dozen things he could say, the words tumbling as a rush into his head like he might make up now for a week’s worth of silence— _What is that flower there with the tiny blue petals? Did someone plant these or did the seed come in with the snowmelt? Do you see it? Do you see it?_ —but they stayed in his mouth, bitter on his tongue.

He put his hand to Ghost’s back and the wolf leaned against his leg, his muzzle still tipped up to catch some invisible thread of scent. Jon shut his eyes and warged him for just a moment, just long enough to ease the ache of his own chest. Their ears were swiveling, tracking the faint and far away sound of the ground birds, the distant rush of the Last River, the tiny noise as the horse resettled one of his hooves. 

The North was not silent, now that Spring had come. No, the whole land was singing and both of them who saw it, saw the strange and wondrous sights, were too mute to sing with it.

And then they stiffened, their muscles bunching; Jon pulled away back into himself, a man with ill thoughts and dangerous hands, a man with a nose not made for seeing the world through. His ears were deaf with only the wind sounding in them.

Ghost tipped a look at him from those wise red eyes, as if to ask, _Pardons, Your Grace. Might I go and see?_

Ghost was Jon’s friend. He knew many words from Jon’s lips and he listened to most of them, but the one they both liked least of was to say, to hear, was _No_. He took his hand from Ghost’s back.

Ghost sprung into the field, the wildflowers shaking and trembling with the pounce and lope as he tore across it, climbing the slope towards the ridgeline and the low scrubby trees that clung to it.

And for a moment, one wild and panicked moment, Jon thought the field ruined. Clouds of color rose into the air, swirling in the disturbed wind, fleeing from the wake as it rippled down the field. His heart crashed and pounded at the thought—a single discordant slam of it that hurt his whole body. Jon caught his breath, stunned, disbelieving—

Butterflies. Butterflies and big heavy moths, too many of them to count and too many to be named, all of them floating up like so much chaff on the wind as they left the field and were caught by the wind and swept with it, light as any puff of thistledown. They soaring into the sky in startling sweeps, like a painter’s ink brush on a bare page, and some even flew so close to Jon that they brushed their wings across his cheeks and caught their legs for a moment in his hair.

He didn’t dare move, not even to brush them away. He’d known the names of some butterflies before, same as he had known the common wildflowers, and it came off his lips unbidden as he stared, his own hoarse voice saying, “Paintwing! And there, a blueglass, by the lady’s jewel. And library moths—I’ve never seen them this big before!” And his finger tracked a score of drab grey wings, big as his hands held together, as they crossed the endlessly blue sky.

There was a glory even in them, so faded next to their brighter fellows, and he asked, turning wildly to the side, “Did you see? Did you—”

The horse lifted his head and stamped uneasily, his tail whisking busily at a fly. The deer-path Jon had followed was empty, and when he turned back the field was settling into itself, the butterflies and moths drifting down lazily to land again, hiding like blossoms among the flowers.

Jon swallowed. His hand still cut the sky, outstretched with no eye to follow it but his own. Slowly he brought it back to his side, and his fingers turned unbidden into a fist.

Ghost was standing on the ridge, looking north. He might have been a last unexpected drift of snow; he might have been a Dornishman’s dream of ice in the syrupy summer heat. He looked distant and untouchable but for the mud caked across his legs and belly. As if he felt it too, the sudden and terrible emptiness, the ache that the waiting did not send away, he tilted his head back and opened his silent mouth to the sky. 

Silent silent silent. Crying crying crying.

Jon could not bear to watch it. He mounted again, the reins gentle in his hands, and turned the horse back to the path. It was two hour’s ride to the riverbank, and if there was another field, another flight of butterflies, another wondrous sight waiting to be looked on the way, he did not see it.

He did not see anything and he did not speak again. The retinue found him silent company when they came later, slowed by the road they were uneasy to leave, and he did not dream of telling them.

He was alone; he was lonely. Some things were kept for himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo! Spring Week 2020 is finally here and I cannot wait to read/watch all the amazing works this small but mighty army of shippers is putting out! A special nod to the meta-writers of tumblr; there is a non-zero chance I have lurked on your blogs frantically reading meta in these past three weeks. I love you guys! You really helped make this work a lot richer and more well thoughtout! <33
> 
> If you're worried to commit because I have a bad track record for finishing things, please note that this work is 100% pre-written. I just couldn't bring myself to jettison so much work at once, and in fear of spamming the tag, I'm releasing a chapter a week.
> 
> If any of you wanna chat about the story, point out a horrible misspelling or grammar mistake, talk about the ship, or just chat in general please feel free to drop a comment (I promise to respond! I swear!) or email me at ao3throwaway27@gmail.com. And as always, thank you for reading/ bookmarking/ kudos/ subscribing/ commenting. This is my favorite ship to write for in no small part because you guys are so great at helping me feel the love <3333333
> 
> 6/14 Edit: Part Two is all set to go up Thursday, 6/18


	2. Chapter 2

> "Alys, do you swear to share your fire with Sigorn, and warm him when the night is dark and full of terrors?"  
> 
> 
> "Till his blood is boiling." Her maiden's cloak was the black wool of the Night's Watch. The Karstark sunburst sewn on its back was made of the same white fur that lined it.  
> 
> 
> Melisandre's eyes shone as bright as the ruby at her throat. "Then come to me and be as one." As she beckoned, a wall of flames roared upward, licking at the snowflakes with hot orange tongues. Alys Karstark took her Magnar by the hand.  
>  —Jon X, _A Dance with Dragons_

  


> This is the iron age,  
>  But let us take heart  
>  Seeing iron break and bud,  
>  Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.  
>  —D.H. Lawrence, _Almond Blossom_

  


### Part Two: Close As Kin

THEY came to Karhold late in the day, when the sun was just starting to set and the moon, a brilliant quarter slice, was yet a distant eye beyond the keep. It peered down at them as they approached, like a curious child from behind a mother’s skirt.

The keep’s towers cut the sky, rising high beyond the curtain walls. It was a good keep, a strong keep, built from heavy Northron stone quarried from a stretch of shore just north of Widow’s Watch and brought to Karhold by boat. Jon, who had met giants and seen the winches and cranks used to haul stone up the face of the Wall, still almost could not believe it had been built in such a way, but Alys was insistent that it had.

The air smelled strongly of the sea, and the sound of the river filled the night, a steady purr that crept between the bird calls and insect song. Karhold did not straddle the river as the Twins did the Green Fork, but it was built on the far side of it, giving the keep a natural moat spanned by a heavy bridge that could be brought down if need be.

His party was not quite at the bridge, the men slowing to look the keep over as they approached, when Jon noticed the lanterns. The men holding them were still shadows, faded colors in the cool dusk, but the lanterns shone a proud yellow and cast enough light on the banners being held there to decipher design from darkness. One held the bronze disk and flames of House Thenn and the other, a smear of dark color on a white field, which could only be the running direwolf of House Stark.

“A fine welcome,” Ser Davos said, easing his horse up next to Jon’s. “Did you see any scouts of theirs? I didn’t, but I’ll admit not to looking.”

“If it was a Thenn scout, looking would not have helped you any,” Jon said. He was quick to dismount, aware that the men behind him were eager for baths and bread and beds of feather and straw tick after weeks of fighting over the few dry patches of ground, sharing dried meat and waybread and a mound of reeking furs.

So they all crossed the bridge on foot, horses trailing behind them. Ghost was for a moment at his heel, and then he was slipping forward with his tail in the air and his nose outstretched. The men were not the only ones with a welcome; Sigorn’s three large hounds were waiting and came with whimpers and barks and whiffles to sniff at Ghost and be sniffed in turn.

A wolf would make a pack from hounds, if there were no wolves left. When Sigorn came striding past the hounds to meet them, Jon was quick to clasp his arm with his own.

“You got lost, huh?” Sigorn asked. “Come so late.” His accent was still thick. He claimed not to speak the Common Tongue very well, but Jon thought some of that must be pretend. Sigorn’s eyes were sharp; it would not surprise Jon to learn he understood more of all things than he let on.

“Not lost,” Jon said. “Only weary of riding. It seemed better to push through than camp another night.”

Ghost was done with his own introductions. Sigorn’s steward, a Karstark man, came forward with the bread and salt, but Sigorn halted Jon with a hand to his shoulder before he could reach for it.

The North held guest rights sacred, especially after the Freys had made mockery of them. It was a piece of Robb’s legacy that always made Jon blink hard a moment. It struck him sure and deep as an arrow whenever he was visiting another keep or welcoming men to his own above the passing platter and bowl. Now Sigorn’s look at Jon, full of scorn, didn’t need words to explain it. Jon’s men would eat, but not Jon; he was kin and kin were not guests. 

The men ate and Sigorn’s steward waved the grooms forward to see to the horses and the castellan to see to the men.

“Alys say you come,” Sigorn said. He might have meant in general and the coaxing letter Jon had received or he might have meant that Jon was being summoned forth at that very moment. Jon couldn’t tell. Sigorn clapped Jon’s shoulder and gave it a rough, friendly shake. 

The North in this was not so different from the South; few people dared to touch a king. It was just a brief moment of weight and heat but it drew out all the tension lingering still in Jon’s shoulders and back until he nearly staggered from the sudden lack of it.

They had not been friends before, he and Sigorn, but the war had made stranger bedfellows. Sigorn’s hawkish face was as familiar in the moonlight and the dark as it would have been in bright sun. Jon did not feel his own usual awkward hesitance at entering a strange place, or the alienating moment of a man meeting the face below the crown that Jon did not wear. 

He punched at Sigorn’s arm as Jon had at Robb’s when they were children and that sun-dark face split into a grin. The hounds and Ghost were at the end of the bridge waiting and Jon was easy when Sigorn bade him to follow the others.

Davos was the only one who had lingered. “Your Grace,” he said with a short bow. “Lord Thenn.” 

Sigorn, as did many of the Thenns, held scorn for any man born south of the Wall. For any man born south of the Neck, he was treated as if he were something out of a child’s fairy story, a creature from some distant star. “You go in, huh,” Sigorn said, not quite friendly, and put his hand on Jon’s shoulder again, turning to put his body between them.

Karhold was perhaps the only place in the world where Jon could go and be protected from his own Lord Hand in that gruff manner. “I’m ill company,” Jon said to Davos, “and Karhold’s halls will hold plenty better. Go and see to yourself, Davos. I need not be attended to here.”

He _was_ ill company and he knew it. He was sullen still from the letter, and from Davos pressing at him, and from the turning of the year. His silences might be excused, as Davos had picked the retinue and filled it with taciturn men himself. But now that the journey was over, Jon did not have it within himself to put back on the face of the king.

It was as if swinging himself from the horse and putting his feet to the bridge stones had drained the last of his strength. Jon felt tired, and his whole body sore with it; just the sight of Karhold had made him a man again and nothing but that.

“As you say, Your Grace,” Davos said after a long moment. He bowed again and turned to follow the steward.

When they were the only men left on the bridge Sigorn said, “Bath? Bed?”

Yes and yes. Jon would like both. But he hadn’t come to Karhold just because it was a place far from Winterfell. He had not come to have Davos fended off of him. Jon had not even come because Karhold was a place where he might finally be left alone for long hours, if he so desired it. 

“I’d see the lady,” he said. “If I may.”

“She say you come,” Sigorn said again, this time with his meaning clear, and rolled his eyes like he meant to share the jape with Jon. 

“Wives,” Sigorn said, a fond word, and steered Jon towards the keep proper. It was said so quickly and plainly that there was no flinch, no hurt. Jon did not even take in his breath.

This was why he came. Bruises in Winterfell were pressed at and worried by a hundred different people, each of them aware of Jon’s thoughts on the matter but unwilling to let them lie. It was a discussion between his lords and the empty chair, his lords and the untouched side of Jon’s bed. In Winterfell, the reservation of those spaces was not a fact.

In Karhold, it _was_ a fact, plain and true. Jon clicked his fingers at Ghost to follow, Ghost who was busy letting his muzzle be licked at by the hounds, and they went.

Not to the Great Hall, for which Jon was grateful. Karhold’s men could not all be as understanding as Alys and Sigorn. They would expect to see a king, for all that Jon had come to be a man. There was no throne, no crown, no duty during that middle week of the middle month, that treacherous day and night when he could not lie easy or sleep well.

There was no need to change his face now. They went up the stairs and down the corridor to a cheerfully carved door, the firelight leaking from under it and turning their boots a rosy shade.

Jon took a moment to knock the worst of the road dust off himself, cast a critical eye to Ghost, and considered for a moment whether he ought to take off his boots. He said, “I hope you don’t like the carpets you have in there.”

Sigorn snorted and swung the door wide. It opened onto a fine room, large and well-lit with the candles and the fire. One wall was solely windows, expensive glazed glass thrown open to let in the night air, heavy with the scent of wet earth and the sea and something distant and spicy and good, almost like honey on the tongue.

Alys was settled in a wooden rocking chair by the fire, dressed in bright blue and green and with her hand spread wide on the heavy swell of her belly. The air around her was golden with the flames—she could have been an idol from the Southron Kingdom, some statue of the Mother wrenched out of a fine Sept. But her eyes gave her away, and her face, the face of a daughter of the North.

The sight of her cheered him. It had been strange at first, passing letters back and forth as they had, but it was not long into the war that Jon had come to appreciate Alys as friend and kin and counsel. Her face was so much like his own as she smiled over at him, that he could not resist teasing her.

“Never mind this,” Jon said to Sigorn, pretending to falter at the sight of her. “Lend me half an hour and the use of your baths and perhaps I will be presentable enough to greet so fine a lady.”

“Spring’s lady,” Alys said and laughed, bright and merry. “And Spring’s lady doesn’t care about the dust. Come and kiss me, cousin, and forgive me for not rising.”

“Too big to get up,” Sigorn said sagely. He went and pressed his face for a moment to the crown of her head, then peered up at Jon with one squinted eye and added, “Like a barge. Big and fat, huh.”

She squawked and smacked at him. “You can go away,” she said. “I won’t make Jon suffer you any longer. Go and sup with the men in the hall, or I’ll have the king toss you out of the keep proper.”

Alys’ long Northron face seemed made for smiling now. Her cheeks appled up as Sigorn blew air like a horse, kissed her head, and settled himself on the low wooden stool on the other side of the hearth.

The hounds who had been busy following after Ghost rushed over at him, tails wagging and tongues out as they panted all over his face, and he dirtied his shirt with their fur, petting them each in solemn turn so none felt left out.

It was a domestic scene and for a single moment Jon felt more alone than he had been on horseback traversing the road. And then Alys was turning back to him, saying, “Drag a chair over, and that little table. The tray’s for you. No, come and sit closer. I _am_ horribly fat, you’ll have to humor a lady who cannot move well.”

Jon could not keep away his smile; he did not try. His was not a mouth made for smiling and for a moment Jon was sure it would not come.

But it did come, spread across his face like honey over hot bread, and Alys’ own smile widened to see it.

It felt good to smile again, a true smile, and not a wry scornful thing over some lord’s buffoonery. He brought another chair closer, and then fetched the little table with the handsome tray. Ghost was at his heel as Jon moved; he peered at the contents of the tray and raised those wise red eyes to Jon again.

“Gods forgive me if I deprive you of your hospitality,” Jon said down to him and that long white tail ticked against the floor.

Jon gave him the ham and most of the chicken. Ghost ate it up in three snatches of his teeth, then went to investigate Sigorn and his hounds.

“One would think you starved him,” Alys said. She had a crumpled cloth on her lap and now she went back to prodding it with her needle, uninterested. “How was your journey? The scout said the roads were a mess, though I have not been out to see them.”

She saw the motion of Jon’s eyes to her belly and laughed. “I have been penned up inside for seven months now, and it is worse than it ever was with the deep snow. Is your party large? Tell me you’ve brought a dozen interesting lords to converse with, and a fine singer, and a fool to turn somersaults and juggle while we eat.”

“I’ll guess you’re bored, then,” Jon said and applied himself to some bread. It was fresh, still warm, and the butter melted into it like rain into parched earth. “No, I’ve left my lords behind but for Davos. I set a task to them and could not risk the failure, so hopefully they will all distract each other from any scheming. T’was a mighty task. They’ll need all the brains and brawn they have between themselves.”

Alys frowned. “You have brought only yourself? Then you shouldn’t have come at all,” she chided. He raised his brow at her and she rolled her eyes back mightily. “Never mind that, if you’re going to be mysterious about it. Tell me about the road. Did I ask you here too early? I would have waited longer into the thaw but—”

But for the middle week of the middle month. The date would not wait for them; the moon kept turning, the night and day of the empty sky came as it would. “Bear it no mind,” Jon said. He made his fingers loose a bare second after they went to curl. “T’was muddy and poor for the horses. Worse for the men, since horses can at least sleep on their feet.”

Alys laughed. “Things are growing, at least,” Jon went on. She was not the first of the women to announce herself increasing, though she was the one whose news Jon had met with the most joy. He tore off a piece of chicken, chewed it consideringly, and added, “Yourself included.”

“My husband is not a liar,” Alys said. She grinned and patted her belly. “I am the size of a barge. In a week’s time, I might not fit through the doors of the keep—the blacksmith will need take them off their hinges so my ladies can shove me through.”

“It won’t be so bad as that,” Jon soothed. “I’ve seen your doors. I am certain they need take off only the one.”

His hounds now attended to, Sigorn had held his hand out for Ghost, who was sniffing at his fingertips and deciding whether he would permit the liberty. He looked up and grinned, then made a motion with his hands, starting them together then slowly spreading them further and further apart, until they were at the full span of his arms.

Alys did not notice for a moment. Sigorn winked. Jon snorted and said, pointing over with the piece of dried apple he held, “So he’s hoping for twins, then?”

She looked over and made a noise of outrage, turning furiously red through her cheeks and brow. “It will be _one_ babe,” she protested, then gave in and let loose a wild bark of laughter.

“To the babe, then,” Jon said and raised his cup to toast them both. “A strong one, as healthy as an aurochs and with her mother’s wild spirit.”

“Huh,” Sigorn said with scorn from his stool. His eyes were narrowed. “Maybe king go now.”

“A spirited child is a _fine_ thing,” Alys protested. "I was spirited, I _am_ spirited, and you know that you would not have it any other way."

Sigorn looked at her, then leveled another squinting look at Jon. “Go curse some other lady,” he said. His brows were drawn together; he looked as fearsome as he had with sword in hand during the war. “Not mine.”

Jon laughed himself. It startled him coming out of his throat like it did, a big surprised burst. He put his hand to his neck, frowning at himself, and Ghost dipped his head to let Sigorn reach the soft fur behind his ears.

“There,” Alys said with satisfaction. Her face was rounder now, with better eating and with her pregnancy. Contentment suited her, Jon thought, far better than a shrill winter’s wind did. Better than snowflakes in her hair and her refusing to let her mouth trembling.

“I told you he would feel better here,” Alys said to Sigorn, a little loftily. And then to Jon, “It did you no good, penning yourself up in Winterfell the way you did. That might serve for Winter, when travel is ill taken, but Spring is here and you needed to, to—”

She paused and took a moment to think. Her eyes were more blue than grey, but they were a little grey. “To be with your people,” she said finally. “To be with those people who knew you as Jon, before you were king.”

Ghost was on the hearthrug now, silently negotiating space among the three hounds, all of them easy with each other. Sigorn had stopped paying them any attention as they spoke. He rasped with a small knife a piece of wood held carefully in his hands, stopping every now and then to raise his head and consider the hounds.

Jon did not want much to speak on it. He was tired; he had replaced his heart with a cairn of battered stone. He filled his mouth to keep from speaking, soft bread and spiced meat and dandelion greens. When Alys saw him do it, she pinched her lips together.

“We were wolves once too,” she said, meaning the Karstarks. That was why she called him cousin though it was not why Jon had come to value her so high. It was her manner and spirit, not her family’s name, that drove Jon to Karhold when the date came and he could not bear to face it in Winterfell alone. 

“So we know. A wolf alone,” she went on gently, “is a terrible thing.”

Jon had once heard much the same from another mouth, only they had not said wolf. They had said _dragon_.

“A dangerous thing,” he said, his hunger curling up and falling away. The ale was like water in his mouth. He thought if he had another piece of bread, it would be ash.

“The only danger you’ve brought with you is the danger of breaking my heart,” Alys said, plain and earnest. She rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling, then blinked them to keep the wetness from trickling down her cheek. “Never mind that either. I can see I’m ruining your dinner. We’ll speak of other things for now.”

Ghost had finally consented to lie down alongside Sigorn’s hounds, and the four of them were snoring and twitching in their sleep together. With the rich dirt covering them, they were all the same color. Laying as they were, they were all the same size. They could have been littermates, only one was much larger than the others. Jon said, “Do you remember Old Nan?”

Alys rightened her head. “Aye,” she said slowly. “A little. Wasn’t she the woman in the nursery, when Father brought Harrion and me to Winterfell?”

Jon nodded. “She used to tell us stories,” he said, pushing the tray aside. His hands were empty with nothing to do with them, no tack to mend or fire to tend to, or sword to sharpen and oil. He rested them on his thighs. “Northron stories. Strange stories,” he said. “She told me once, and it was so long ago I cannot remember the words anymore, that all dogs used to be wolves before they came into our pastures and stables and homes.”

Jon wondered if the sleeping hounds were remembering being wolves, a thousand thousand years ago. He wondered if they dreamed about it, when they dreamed.

He wondered if Ghost remembered his pack.

Jon was the last of the men, now. Robb lay dead at the Twins, his bones lost, and Bran could be heard only the whisper of rustling weirwood leaves, and Rickon rested in stone in the crypts, his iron sword now forever in his statue’s hand.

Greywind too was lost, and Summer disappeared into that strange old magic, and Shaggydog’s bones filled the empty spaces between the pieces of Rickon’s broken body.

“I have a pack still,” Jon said. “As distant as some members of it are, and as odd to me.”

“Don’t pretend you speak on Lady Lannister,” Alys told him. Her brow was furrowed.

The name struck him a foul blow. Lady Lannister stayed hidden in the Vale even now in Spring, refusing her husband’s summons to come south. She who had mocked Jon as a fool for his questing and refused to aid him, promising no coin as reward, sending no men searching through the Riverlands, writing no letters to those few Southron houses likely to shelter a lost wolf pup. 

Alys looked at Jon shrewdly. “I will take any answer but that,” she said.

“No,” Jon said. Her keen look sent his voice back to softness. “That is not my meaning. I meant—”

His hands empty on his thighs. He turned the burnt hand to a fist without thinking. “I don’t know what I mean,” he murmured. “The hour is late, my lady, and I am tired. Listen to me not.”

“I don’t intend to,” Alys said. She studied his face for a moment and Jon let her only because they were kin, or close enough to it. He could not bear to be looked at in such a way by any other, and now after three years, the lords did not try. They kept Jon out of the silences they passed between themselves and hid from him the concern it spoke to, once they learned he would not force himself to swallow it.

“Are they still calling you mad?” Alys asked suddenly. 

Jon looked away. She was not a lady to hold her blows. Ghost was curled tight, his tail tucked over his nose, and even if he was awake, what advice could those red eyes possibly give Jon?

“It does not matter,” he said after a moment. 

“I think it does,” Alys pressed. She leaned forward as much as she could, as if she might reach for his hand. The needle in her hand had fallen away, the cloth slipping to the floor. “It is a lie and a poor one. It matters, especially if you believe it. Jon—”

Whatever his face did, he could not speak to it. But it must have done something, something small and terrible. She fell silent.

The truth Jon told himself was that she was alive. He had stopped the looking—the men, the ravens, the promise of reward—after Lady Brienne had written to him from King’s Landing, but he could not mourn either because some part of him deeper than his heart, deeper than his lungs, deeper inside him than the marrow in his bones, insisted he could not. The same strange part of him that tasted blood when Ghost was hunting, that dreamed of flying when the dragons came, the same part of him having Spring dreams about something that could not be. It screamed it, howling and thrashing as it tore at him, that she was alive.

She was still in the world somewhere, being kept from him. And the idea of that enraged him, that someone would dare— 

He had stopped the looking. The world was large; Jon could not find her that way. Now he was made to wait and to put faith in her that wherever she was, she would return to him. The gods had promised Jon that he would take her hand; Jon had faith in the old gods still.

He did not know how to put it, how to tell Alys the truth of it without making himself sound mad.

“It has been seven years,” he settled on. “I will not give it up. What is it, if not madness? My lords name it true.”

“Your lords name it convenient,” Alys snapped. Her cheeks were red with rage on his behalf. Jon had not known her to cry often, and certainly her eyes had been dry when she had ridden to the Wall, but now she dabbed at them with her fingertips before she could continue.

“You will not wed? Then they need not worry about any alliance placing another family ahead of theirs in your regard. You will not wed, so you will have no children? Well then it serves that you need name one of their children as your heir, since it certainly will not be Lady Lannister’s babe with that title. They will do nothing to convince you otherwise—”

A wolf who came in the door and slept by the fire was still a wolf. Jon’s mouth was washed with copper taste. He said, forcing himself to keep his lips over his teeth, “As you would?”

If her look to him had been angry, he needed only get angrier in return. But it was hurt instead, and the corners of her mouth turned down. Her cheeks were damp now. “We were wolves once _too_ ,” Alys said again. “We pray the same gods and we hold the same laws. A man weds once, unless his wife dies, and while she lives he will take no other.”

She swiped a hand across her face. “Damn this babe,” she muttered. “I cannot do anything without weeping over it.”

He had no kerchief to offer her. Jon said, quietly, “I’m sorry. I know you would not—”

“But the rest would,” Alys said back. “And you’ve been among them long enough. I’m glad you’re here, you awful thing. Aye, glad for the sullenness and the snarls. I could not bear the thought of you spending her name-day with those, those _dogs_.”

The way she said it, it was clear she meant another word. “They serve me well enough,” Jon said but could not rouse his spirit to truly defend his lords.

“You’re the king,” Alys said. “They have to.”

They sat in silence for a long while, the fire crackling and Alys’ chair creaking as she rocked herself, her hand making soft soothing strokes over her belly.

They might have sat there in silence for the rest of the night, for forever. It was Sigorn that broke it. He leaned forward on his stool, catching Jon’s eye, and said, “Six-and-ten.”

“Aye,” Jon said. He hid his startle; Sigorn knew more than he let on. 

Alys said, softly, “A woman grown. A fine age for a marriage.” Her smile a little wry, she added, “And I should know. Six-and-ten is just the right age to be a bride.”

Plain fact, as cool as a gentle hand against a bruise. Jon had waited seven years. He would wait seven more, a hundred. He would die waiting and start again in the next life, if he had to. The war had taught him patience when as a green boy he’d known none. Anything worth having was worth waiting for, but especially this. Jon was not afraid of _waiting_. 

“Six-and-ten,” he said and rubbed his face. Then like a hand extended with a flag of peace, “Can you remember being six-and-ten? T’was less than five years ago, but sometimes it feels half a lifetime to me.”

If there was any secret fear lingering in his heart, buried under his ribs and lurking like a catspaw behind the certainty and faith, it was this: he had grown apart from her so long and she from him that they would be strangers when they came together again.

He could not imagine not knowing his own heart. The thought of it plagued him.

“We were mad, huh,” Sigorn supplied into the silence. “Six-and-ten.” He shook his head and turned over the scrap of wood he held.

“Aye,” Jon said again, his voice hoarse. Six-and-ten and they had been on the brink of two wars. Six-and-ten and they had been the last of their lines. Six-and-ten and the three of them had been hovering at the edge of losing everything.

It had not killed them. It had not destroyed them. But it had made them all mad in their greenness. Those soft years before had not prepared them at all for what was to come ahead.

Could Jon say true that the madness had passed him behind? Seven years and he was still waiting, building from the ruins of the North something he would be proud to lay at her feet as bride-price and dower.

What was love, if not madness? It made fools of men. Once he had been cautioned that love was the death of duty. Once he had been told the gods had fashioned them all for love.

Jon had felt both. He had seen both. He bore the scars across his back and chest; he kept the chair empty, the right side of the bed free. The night lanterns above Winterfell’s iron and oak gates were always lit.

He did not know if the same madness that chased him chased her as well, wherever she was. 

“The hour is late,” Jon said. He was tired of thinking. He felt raw under Alys’ keen eyes. “I should take my leave of you.”

Alys did not press the matter. Her hand was soft and warm when he took it in his and bowed over it. Ghost was sleeping still. Jon whistled, softly, and he was quick to lift his shaggy head and blink up at him.

“To me, Ghost,” he said. 

“Snow,” Sigorn said. He held out the scrap of wood, turned an eye from it to Ghost as he padded across the room, then offered it to Jon.

Jon took it carefully, turning the little figure over in his hands. Sigorn had carved it out of a piece of firecord tree and so it was already a weathered grey despite the fresh scent of the shavings. 

It was a wolf, Jon saw, as he turned the figure over again. It wasn’t carved howling or snarling, or in the way of the Stark sigil, running proudly. No, it was only standing with one foot a little forward, like he might be able to place it on the ground and see it walk.

“I saw in sun once,” Sigorn said. “I saw her, huh. Grey to the white.” And he nodded at Ghost, who stood yawning near the door.

The eyes were tiny yellow beads and they caught the fire brightly, turning to a liquid gold.

It was, Jon realized with the slow muffled senses of a man with his head underwater, Nymeria. And once he knew that, he saw the likeness as plainly as any mirror might show her. Here was a true direwolf, not a hound or lesser cousin.

He looked up, struck silent. There were no words in his mouth.

“Amber,” Sigorn said and touched a finger to the corner of his own eye. “So she can see you.”

It was like Sigorn had cracked Jon’s ribs open and taken a peek inside the wet cavity of his body. Jon felt stripped. He felt _seen_. He closed his fingers over the wooden wolf, hiding it carefully in his fist, and nodded a silent thanks.

Alys gave him pity in the face of her husband’s flaying eye. “Your bedchamber is down the hall from ours,” she said softly, keeping her face to the fire. Her own eyes had brimmed over again. “The same one as before. I think you can find it.”

“Aye,” Jon rasped and quit the room. His heart crashed and pounded madly, bruising up his chest. 

Ghost followed silently at his heels. When Jon stopped near a window to catch some air, his chest gone tight, Ghost stuck his wet nose to Jon’s clenched hand. The cold touch shocked him into movement again.

He found his room, the same he had stayed in the last time, the first time, that he had come to Karhold. The fire was burning, the wash water was hot, and none of it, not even the grit rubbing roughly against his skin, seemed important anymore.

Suddenly, forcefully, Jon craved sleep. He wanted to lie his head down and forget for a little while. He wanted to see faces he had not seen in seven years. He wanted memory and warmth and his pack piled onto the hearthrug all around him. He wanted Spring dreams that he could better trust would come true.

The windows here were open, too. Big heavy panes swung out to let in the air, still smelling like the sea and that faint and distant sweetness. Jon sat himself on the stone ledge and opened his hand to regard the wooden wolf again.

Ghost came over, curious, and Jon held the little figure up so he could nose at it. “Your sister,” Jon said. “Do you remember her? T’was not seven years for you, only three.”

Nymeria had come to the wall as queen of a pack two hundred strong. After the fighting was over, when they’d burned her dead with theirs out of strong respect and made busy marshaling their own armies to go back south, she had scorned every effort to tempt her with them.

Jon had wanted her, in the Wolfswood if she was wild now, and in his keep if she was not. Some solid proof that her mistress had lived. That he had not dreamed up the smiling mouth, the quick eyes and dirty knees and tangled hair.

Jon was not a man who got what he wanted.

Those baleful red eyes turned to him. _Of course I remember_ , they seemed to say. _The memory of a wolf is longer than the memory of a man._

There was a moment’s time, as he and Ghost stared at each other, the wooden wolf between them, where Jon almost warged him, slipping from his own skin as loosely as he could slip from his clothes.

A scent came into the air, a dreamy half-forgotten scent that drove away the sea salt and distant honey. Grass and dirt and sweaty skin and musky fur. The lingering fragrance of wildflowers, clutched as a fistful in a small hand.

“Aye,” Jon said and came back into himself. “Aye, we both remember and no mistaking it.”

He kept the wolf close while he washed, set on its feet by the basin and ewer, then took it in hand as he dug through his bags for a clean shirt. It stayed there, warm wood between his fingers, as he lay himself down, his cheek to the pillow. The phantom scent stayed with him, too. Soft in the air, sweeter than the finest perfume, and he shut his eyes, pulling in deep lungfuls of it.

He hoped he dreamed.

JON woke early, in the thin grey moments before the sun rose. It was not in him to linger long in his bed. He rose and dressed and stood at the window for a long moment, watching the mist from the river snake through the lands around the keep, worrying at the wooden wolf with his thumb.

He could not remember his dreaming. He knew he had dreamed, but the thought of it caught at the corner of his mind, a piece he could not dislodge no matter how he squinted up his face and focused on it.

T’was not an ill dream, a war dream, or a dream from the black times just before. His heart had been calm in his chest when he rose, his muscles loose and easy. But he wanted to remember, and he worked at it sullenly, his eyes on the distance but not seeing it.

It was a relief when Sigorn banged at his door to summon him to the yard. He did not want to leave the wooden wolf behind, but he had seen the Thenns fight before and he did not want to break it. He set it on the table at the side of the bed, carefully, and called Ghost to his side before he went.

The Karstarks had been wolves once. Ghost was given free run of the keep and the yards; he need only stand at a door and wait for any passing man, who would open it for him. The Thenns especially took care with him. They nodded at Jon, polite looks on their faces. The Thenns knew well about wargs.

The morning was easy spent. Jon fought with the other men for two hours in the yard, working out the stiffness from the riding and the lack of practice, then broke his fast in the Great Hall. It helped that there were so many Thenns here, for they were more interested in his prowess in the yard than in his status as king, and their casual scorn for the Karhold smallfolk who came to stare and whisper kept him from being bothered too much.

When Alys came down, dressed for the day and determined to commandeer him, Jon was in a fine enough mood, hair damp from his bath and arms sore from the work, that he agreed to go with her with no complaint.

He offered her his arm for the stairs and she kept it even when they were on solid ground, taking small steps and leaning warmly against his side. “It seems to me some days that we have done so little,” Alys said as they stood and looked up at one of her towers, where scaffolds stretched across the broken crown and men scurried, far and distant and small like ants.

“It’s slow work using a man’s hands to do what a giant did first,” Jon said. Winterfell, patched and scarred, looked like a child’s block castle to him some days, uneven and unfinished and unloved.

They used to build block castles for Rickon on the nursery floor, just to watch his delight as he knocked them down. The thought of it, the quick memory, pained Jon and amused him in turns. Now it made him huff a little laugh to picture again the look on Rickon’s face when he toddled in with his fat fingers held carefully in another thinner hand—the plain delight as Rickon let out a shriek and charged the uneven towers. 

“Everything seems too slow to me these days,” Alys said, tugging at Jon’s arm to move him along. “It was hard enough just waiting for the snows to melt, but now they are gone and we are left waiting yet again? How cruel it seems! Spring is here! It seems to me that my babe should be here as well, and the repairs should be done between one night and the next, all the birds hatched and little things born, the ground thawed so next I look out my bower window I can finally watch the grain grow.” She laughed a little, ruefully.

“It’s made me dreadfully impatient,” she admitted. “We hoped and prayed so long for Spring, and here it is, at last, coming at a _crawl_.”

“Waiting doesn’t get easier,” Jon said. “You just resign yourself to it.” Alys was taking him towards the stables now and a groom went past leading a horse, pausing to bow to them both. “Suppose you had your fill of it during the war,” he went on when the man had passed.

“Seems to me I did,” Alys said. They crossed under a covered bridge and she stilled him, tilting her head up to watch a flock of sparrows fly overhead. 

“There were a thousand things to do in a day then,” she went on. “And so, no better way to spend it than working to keep myself from going mad between one raven and the next. It seems almost to cheapen that, complaining as I do now because I do not have enough work, but I cannot bring myself to stop.” 

The birds found perches on the roof of the granary, huddled together cheeping loudly at each other and puffing themselves up against the cool wind.

“You were a side of the war unto yourself,” Jon said, looking up at them. “How many more men would have died if they could not be sent to Karhold for nursing? How many smallfolk frozen if they couldn’t warm themselves at your fire? If anyone is owed some impatience, if the gods owe anyone the madness of Spring, it’s you, my lady.”

Alys pinked up at his words and ducked her head. “We all worked ourselves to the bone,” she said. “I will not have it said that managing a keep and some people is as difficult as ought else. Fighting in snow up to your ass day after day, until you’d rather die than keep freezing, for instance.”

_The woman is important too!_ And Jon knew that better now, ruling over Winterfell and the North as he did with no helpmeet to match him. Lady Jeyne might serve as hostess, and Lady Manderly tended to Jon’s household as well as her goodfather’s, but constantly there came new problems that Jon could not have anticipated with his lord’s education, and yet still must solve himself.

“A lady’s work cannot be said to outpace a lord’s,” he said, “nor the lord’s work the lady’s. I cannot set a value to your work and then another to the soldiers’ when t’was both that saved many lives. I’ll only say, I am grateful for it, yours and theirs.”

“Some days,” Alys teased, “I forget you are wise under all that sullenness.”

Jon snorted. “And some days I forget you cannot be made to hold your tongue even by force,” he said back. They were leaving the granary now and headed towards the kitchen yards.

“It’s because I knew you when you were small,” Alys told him. “I cannot take a man seriously when I saw him menaced by sprouts and made to dance when t’was clear he would rather do anything else. Think it this way—cousin, if I had less spirit, then all your scowling would have made me weeping and fearful of you. Where would we be then? I might have feared you more than Cregan and stayed resigned to my fate.”

A low stone wall parted the herb wheels from the vegetable beds. “I do not think you have been resigned in your entire life,” Jon murmured.

“Mayhaps not,” Alys conceded with a little laugh. “Come and sit a moment,” Jon helped her sink down to rest on the stone and sat himself beside her.

Two little girls were digging in the dirt near the far wall, pushing in sticks and bits of grass and flower stems to pretend it was a garden. Their clothes were neat and well-mended, their bones hidden under a good layer of puppy fat.

“More women’s work,” Alys said, rubbing a hand over her belly and watching them as well. Her feet moved; Jon caught with a glance the moment she toed off her slippers and dug her heels into the cool dirt.

“They’ll keep your babe fed someday,” he said mildly. An army marched on its belly, not its feet, and a kingdom did much the same. Jon could not longer scorn a farmer or a woman at work in her garden.

Alys turned her face towards his, then changed her mind and raised it to the warm sunlight. “Don’t mistake me,” she chided, sunlight spilling over her and gilding the bones of her cheeks. “I do not disdain it. I do not think you can be a woman and disdain a woman’s work. Only, it is funny, is it not? Them digging in the dirt, learning to themselves how to work it.”

Her voice went softer, a little distant. “Mine own mother took me down to the gardens when I was small,” Alys said. “And had the gardener show me which plants were ready and when and how many we needed. I was black under my nails for weeks after, and coated with feathers after she took me to the dovecotes and the hen houses, and I can still remember the heat and the steam of the laundry when she took me there, too.”

“She used to tell me that a woman and a lady cannot learn what she needs without dirtying her hands. She said that to be a woman was to do the ugly work of it. That you could not meet your lord husband on equal terms unless you had done the work as well. I had not remembered until just now…” And her hand moved on her belly, slow and careful strokes.

Did her daughter even yet kick and turn inside her? Was the babe as anxious and eager to tumble with Alys’ spirit and cheer into the world, ready to greet the Spring with wide eyes and lusty cries? Those fat little hands would be at work someday, Jon thought. In the gardens and the dovecotes and the laundry, learning at her mother’s knee.

There was a space to the right of him, the air cool on his arm and side in a way the sun could not warm. Jon found he had nothing to say on the matter. He raised his eyes to watch the wind blow fat white clouds across the sky. 

They were silent for a while, Alys lost to her remembering and Jon struggling not to give in to his. “Speaking of a woman’s work,” Alys said at last, thoughtfully, and he groaned.

“You do not even know which woman I will ask about,” Alys protested and kicked her feet gently against the wall. 

“I only know so many,” Jon said. “And fewer still you’d gossip to me about. Ask you about Maege Mormont and her latest hunting of the bears? Or perhaps you would like to hear about Lady Cerywn, who is so sour to look upon that she is banned from her own cow barns for fear of curdling the cream?”

Alys blurt out a choppy laugh and made as if to throw something at him, though her hand was empty. “It isn’t gossip,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking. But after a moment, it faded to a narrow-eyed look. “But you get the ravens first, for all you pass them off to your lords. So I only wonder, what news of the South?”

He was glad to be in the sun, glad to be in the garden. “The South, or of the Southron queen?” Jon asked and rubbed a hand across his face.

“Of the _trials_ ,” Alys said and kicked at his leg. She left a smear of dirt across his shin and turned herself laboriously to face him. “You have no care left for it, since Lady Brienne wrote, but I’ll admit that it’s made me hungry for something I cannot find at my table.”

Jon readied another quip, but Alys’ quick eyes were somber. She’d lost her three brothers to Lannister men and he straightened his back remembering that. Jon had supped on his share of vengeance, but if his kin were hungry still—

“Last of the news said it was three weeks left before the trials were over,” he said, “and that was two weeks ago now. They’ve already finished trying the lesser soldiers and several lords. The bitch still claims innocence, but Queen Daenerys will not put it to combat. She has brought together a council of her lords and they will vote it after every man is done having his say, but you and I already know what the vote will bring.”

“Guilty,” Alys said and her mouth twisted with want to spit. “Aye, and I hope they take her head for it. That would be a fine sight, all that golden hair on the spike—mayhap when the babe is born I will go south for a little while to see it.”

The thought chilled him. Jon shook his head. “There’s nothing but ruin in the South,” he said gently. “I would not lose more kin to it, if given a choice.”

Those shrewd eyes blinked. He could not tell if they held astonishment or if they held disbelief. “The queen would not—” Alys said, then paused and worked her jaw a moment. Finally she said, “I know not what to ask. Would she— Are we unsafe to go there?”

“The queen is no threat to us,” Jon assured her. This he believed for true. He and Daenerys had parted on sour terms, but she still saw Jon as her kin—blood of her blood—never mind how many times he said nought. 

He felt pity for her, that she too was the last of her family. And truly the last, not as Jon himself was one of three. But while dragonseed had made him, and while the name had some uses, Jon was a Snow and he was a Stark.

He could not magic himself into a dragon. He could not make himself love her. He’d turned down her hand, cast aside his blood claim to the South, and she had gone from the North in peace.

This same sunlight poured down onto the Crownlands as well as the North. Surely there were children there too, digging and playing in the dirt, and somewhere a lord and lady sitting on a low stone wall, close as kin. Daenerys had won her peace and Jon would give her this—she held it well. But never again would a Stark, even a bastard half-Stark, trust the Southron crown and the Southron court with the care and keeping of more wolves.

Alys still had that curious look. Jon would have her understand. 

“The South is ill luck for Northron folk,” he said. “It eats up our kin and spits out their bones, if it gives us back any.”

Her hand was thin and warm when she pressed her fingers to his. Three Karstark brothers ahead of her, and none who passed the Neck had returned to see Karhold again. “My brothers would not want me go,” Alys conceded. “Aye, but I’ll cry from laughing when the bitch dies. What will they do with the bones after she’s dead, do you think? I cannot imagine the Rock will want them.”

Jon shifted uncomfortably. All the more reason to keep the North to the North, well away from the turning grinding gears of the games those Southroners played there. “There won’t be bones,” he said with some grimness. “She burns them.”

Alys shared that uncomfortable look with him. “Dragonfire,” she said. “I’ve seen it just the once when she passed overhead. She made her beast flame as a signal that all was well.”

Jon had seen it so often that sometimes it came before his eyes again when he shut them. It had lit up the Long Night; they had fought by it and sweated by it and died by it, and it was only through dragonfire that any of them had lived. But Jon was a Stark, never mind the man that had made him, and he could not make himself be easy with it.

It was a good reminder to those Daenerys had spared, to make them watch the deaths of the ones that she had not. T’was a sound tactic, to keep the peace she had so laboriously bought.

But dragonfire burned hotter than even green and wicked wildfire. It melted the flesh and boiled the brain and charred the bones until a single touch could render them to fine ash. 

Jon could not cheer a man dying by it.

The air seemed colder now, for all the sun still poured down golden on their faces. “I want the bitch dead as much as any,” Alys said thoughtfully, “but to burn to death is a poor way to do it.”

“A Southron way,” Jon agreed. They did not need to share a look. They both knew that it meant the same thing.

“I can forgive them their new gods,” Alys said. She took away her hand to brush her hair off her face. “I can forgive them their queer accents and their strange manners, and I can even forgive how cloddish they act when they come into our homes. But I do not think I can forgive them this. Any man who passes the sentence, aye, but they owe themselves the dignity of the sword even if they do not owe it to the men they are killing.”

One of the little digging girls, and she could not have been off the breast very long, was busy at work now piling soft mounds of earth over her own feet. Her small fat hands were clumsy with it. She was smiling as she worked, all of her freckled with soft dirt and blades of new grass and clover flowers.

The wooden wolf was safe in his pocket. Jon touched his fingers to the outline of it but did not take it out. It was enough to know that it was there.

“Your children will know better than we did,” Jon said. “They’ll know justice and they’ll know honor and they’ll know their parents, that they might be the ones to teach it to them. They won’t have to fumble in the filth and the mud and the wars trying to carve out their own knowledge of it. But the others, I do not know— Some days I pity the ones that must grow in the South.”

Alys looked over at the little girls and nodded. She put her hand back to her belly and gave a slow stroke to the swell of it. She said, “My daughter will have the right of it, the right way our fathers tried to teach us. The way we live by now.” 

The sunlight turned her eyelashes to ashy gold and killed the faint blue in her eyes. “Four days ago, some women from the cottages down the river came to the keep. They’d had a chicken stolen, and bread from their own houses. Their nanny goat was dry three days running in the morning. And do you know what they wanted from me?”

“Not a hand to come swing down a sword,” Jon said with certainty. The North was different now that they had all starved together.

“They wanted a basket from the keep, to leave out for whoever was so hungry,” Alys said. “Northron justice. Northron honor.”

“We’re a proud people,” Jon agreed. “Speak to any of the lords cluttering up my keep and you’ll know it. But we’re proud of the right things and I cannot say the same for any man who’s grown up below the Neck.”

“Well said,” Alys told him. She stretched stiffly, sighing, and put a hand to her back.

“More walking?” Jon was quick to ask. Her face was a little pinched.

“I cannot be comfortable when I am still,” Alys admitted. “It drives my husband mad; his greatest wish right now is for me to stay in the keep, if not in my bower, with some women to attend me at all times. But I cannot bear it—I want to wander wherever I see fit.”

“I do not like to argue with a lady,” Jon said and helped her back to her feet. The second little girl was now trying to uncover the first one’s feet, squawking at her in outrage. He touched the outline of the wooden wolf and made himself breathe in, deeply.

They were out the gardens and towards the dovecotes before he realized and said, “Your shoes!”

She was barefoot in the dirt and laughed at the look on his face. “Leave them,” she said and waved the hand not tucked into his arm. “Every man, woman, and child in this keep knows I cannot be kept in those things for more than an hour. They’ll find their way back to my rooms eventually.”

“You said last night you were wolves as well,” Jon said. “I did not think you meant it so truthfully, my lady.”

“Scratch a Karstark and you’ll find a Stark,” Alys said. 

“Scratch a Karstark and you’ll find a wolf with no manners,” Jon said back. “A highborn lady like you going about shoe-less in the dirt—”

She gave him a wry look. “It is a fine thing to walk barefoot on your own land and not risk losing your toes, Jon Snow,” she declared. “Take off your boots and see if you don’t believe me then.”

He gave her a look back and she threw her head back with laughing. “That is the same look you gave me when Lord Stark said you need dance with me,” she said, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. She gave his arm a pat.

They passed the dovecotes and Jon thought to continue down the path past the walls to the orchard, but Alys stilled him. “Another day,” she said, her hair a banner behind her as the breeze came rushing over it.

The air smelled strongly of the sea and strongly of that sweetness. Jon raised his brow at her and she said only, “You’ve come to far to see us, and you’ve indulged me so well. Can you not do it a little longer? Or will you insist on spoiling all my fun?”

It was her keep; she was the lady of it. And as much as the pregnancy had added a roundness to her face, it had also added a little tiredness to her eyes. She was busy at women’s work; she was dug deep into the spring. 

He did not like to argue with this lady. “As you say,” Jon said, giving in without fight. “Where to then, Lady Thenn?”

“Inside,” Alys said, casting an eye towards the stairs and bridge that led back to the hall. “I am hungry and you need join me for lunch.”

“It’s not even noon,” Jon said, surprised, and wished he could swallow the words back down at the way she raised her brows towards him. So what if it was not noon, he thought. They had all of them been hungry long enough.

“I am the size of a barge,” Alys said, though she kept her good humor. “Eating at regular hours did not make me this way, Your Grace.”

“No, I’d say your husband did,” Jon said.

She smacked at him and turned towards the stairs. “You are very horrible,” she told him as she put her hand to the banister. “But it’s well enough. I have the perfect punishment for you. How _are_ your lords, King Jon?”

Her smile was the easy lolling smile of a hound that found its quarry on its back foot.

“Gods preserve me,” Jon said. He gave a dramatic groan over her snicker. “They’re mad and quarrelsome and fools, of course. Them and the Braavosi. I hope they suit each other well.”

She paused on the step above to turn and raise her brows at him, and Jon put a hand to her back to steady her. “The Braavosi,” she said. “I suppose your beggar’s letter finally arrived and they deigned come down from their towers to answer it?”

“Yes, and it is them that I have come running from,” Jon said. “Karhold’s walls are strong and its people are loyal. I should be safe here.”

Alys rolled her eyes and turned back to take another step. “I should have known my cousin was a coward,” she said as if to herself. “Your own direwolf is white, so t’would only be the work of a moment for me to change your house banners to match him.”

“You say that now,” Jon said, feeling some of the humor slip away, “but you know not what they wrote to me.”

He tried to keep the change from his voice, but she paused on the landing and peered at him closely. With him on the steps still, Alys was taller. She searched his face a moment and Jon was quick to say, “Another time. It would be a shame to spoil the morning with a poor mood and you hardly deserve my ire, sheltering me from enemy forces as you are.”

Her face was kind, fond, as she reached out and patted his cheek. “Our future conversations will all be fraught,” she said. “Putting things off is a grim Winter habit to have, cousin. I don’t envy us when _another_ time comes about to _now_.”

The last of his smile slipped away. “After,” Jon managed to say and she knew what he meant. He could not think on it now; he could hardly bear to speak on it. Coming to Karhold had stripped him of his defenses. She patted his cheek again, this motherly girl who was nearly a year younger than he, and nodded.

“After,” she agreed. “In the orchards. It will take away the sting to be among the trees.”

THE night air was cool by the time Jon made it back to his bed. He only glanced at the ashes in the hearth before he threw the window open. The wind was kissing the sky, the castle walls, his face, and Ghost came to put his paws up on the sill beside him.

The scent was good. He thought he would miss it when he went back to Winterfell. The sea air, the distant sweetness on his tongue. When Ghost tilted his head back, his long pale throat exposed and his mouth open in silent song, Jon had a thought to join him.

As a child, Jon had once stood on the battlements, one among many, and they had tipped their own heads to the moon, hands round their mouths to let the sound carry as they tried to stir the wolves in the Wolfswood into singing.

It was a childish thought; he set it aside. There was no one there to hear it, the weak man’s voice trying to stir the rich dark wolfsong. There would be no song in answer.

His throat ached. He relaxed his fingers carefully.

The wooden wolf was safe in his pocket. Jon rubbed the outline of it, then took it out carefully. Nymeria’s golden eyes regarded him, the soft moonlight turning her coat to silver. Silver and gold, a fine gift. 

A gift fit for a queen.

The scent in the air—the grass, the sea, the musk from Ghost’s coat. Ghost watched the world from the window, his red eyes unblinking, and the moonlight turned him to agate and moonstone and opal.

The North did not put its stock in fine clothes and jewelry. They did not hold truck with pretty words. Their manner was rough, their keeps were crude. They built with flesh and blood and bone, and when they built, they built on ice as solid as any stone.

It was Spring now. The ice was melting deep in the heart of the North. Jon was fiercely glad he knew how to swim. He only wished—

He wanted not to swim alone.

He placed the wooden wolf on the bedsheets while he stripped. The air was soft and cool on his skin; he laid himself out with the wolf in his hand, watching over its shoulders and back as Ghost curled himself on his rug.

Jon was not a man who got what he wanted.

He closed his fingers around the wooden wolf and brought his hand to his mouth, pressed his lips to his scarred knuckles, and sighed. The sheets were soft, cool, and he could the distant whispering call of the ocean.

The moonlight cast shadows across the room and fell over his face, white bright and silvery. Snowlight. He blinked the soft scatter of snowflakes away from his eyes, the light changing, going weak and thin, and she was there in the shadows, reaching out, cupping his hand in hers.

His hand was big enough to hide the wooden wolf in full, but her fingers were thinner, bony and tough with callouses. He gave it over and she turned it in her hands, then smiled up at him shyly.

The snow fell around them, brushing their skin and sticking to their hair. It crowned her with a fine silvery veil. Jon flicked a piece away, watching it flutter to the ground, then cupped her cheek with his hand.

_Ah_ , she said into his mouth when he kissed her, just the softest of sighs, and she put her hands to his shirt and clung. Her lips were chapped and the inside of her mouth was soft, hot to his tongue.

She kissed with her eyes open, silver and sweet as Valyrian steel. A snowflake caught in her lashes and she blinked; it tumbled down her cheek and away. When he pressed his forehead to hers, she giggled, the smallest sound, and touched her fingers to his own cheek.

They were hot, a brand on his skin. He put his other hand in her hair, thick and tangled under his fingers. She smelled like salt, the ocean, like new green grass and skin and some sweet spicy perfume.

The cold couldn’t touch them. The snow fell all around and she kissed him again and shut her eyes, the lids milky pale in the moonlight, and he shut his own and drew her closer.

He was hungry for her, for her skin. Her waist was skinny under his hand. He touched the dip of it, then wormed his fingers under her rough filthy tunic to touched the ladder of her ribs. She sighed again, sweetly.

A wolf was howling, far away from them. He blinked his eyes open, drawing away and she cuddled closer, pressing her face to his neck. Her hair was covered in snowflakes and the shadows laying dark on it turned the hearts of the snowflakes dark as well. The wolf was still singing and he put his hand to her back and opened his mouth to say—

A furious scrabbling noise, frantic in the snow-soft silence, and he

Woke up with his empty hand reaching out across the bed, the sheets cool and soft under his fingertips. Jon blinked hard and shoved himself up, bolt upright and his heart crashing and pounding in his chest hard enough to make it ache.

It was Ghost making that noise, Jon saw. His nails clattered on the wood floor as he raced to the window and put his paws up on the sill, then to the door and scratched at the heavy oak. He was tossing his head, panting furiously, and Jon heard the wolfsong come again.

That wasn’t a dream then. He wiped his hand across his face, touched his mouth gingerly, which still had the weight of those kisses, like it was bruised with them, and swung his legs out of bed.

“Enough, wolf,” he said to Ghost. His voice was hoarse, hurt. Jon swallowed. “Damn you, could you not wake me any other night?”

Those wet red eyes turned towards him, then Ghost swung his whole body about and went to the window again. From the open window, the night air came in and brought with it the faint and echoing sound. 

_Awwooooooo! Awwooooooo!_

Just one voice, Jon realized. Whoever was crying was packless. Alone. His body was heavy with sleep. He stumbled to his feet, running his hands through his hair. He expected the coldness, the wetness of melted snow. His fingers came away dry.

Moonlight turned Ghost to a phantom. He could have been made of weirwood to match the firecord wolf. Jon turned to rummage through the sheets for it, wanting it in his hand. 

For a moment, his heart hammered and gave a painful thump. He couldn’t find—

It wasn’t in the sheets—

His arm struck the bedside table as he turned to search the floor and the wolf clattered to its side. He paused, then picked it up slowly. The knock hadn’t hurt it any and it fit well in his hand, the wood quick to warm to his skin with just a bare touch. It was almost warm on its own, as if it was Nymeria for true, small and beautiful in his hand.

His body was so slow and heavy with sleep, with want for dreaming.

The wolf howled, distant and mournful. The hounds in the kennel yard had twigged to it; they bayed back. Ghost was still standing with his paws on the windowsill and Jon came over to press a hand to his head. He stroked the soft fur behind his ears and those wise red eyes turned to him.

_Can you hear it?_ they asked Jon. _Can you hear it too? We are all of us alone._

It was almost morning. The sky was dove feathers and grey Northron stone, not the deep black wash of ocean waters. Jon struggled into his breeches, put the wooden wolf safe into his pocket, and went to the door. “With me, Ghost,” he said.

He was careful to be quiet in the hall. The stairs to the battlements were empty, the rings for the torches bare. The dark did not bother Jon. He climbed to the open air, Ghost tight at his heel, and turned his face to the night to catch the sound again.

For a long while, standing barefoot on the cold stone, Jon did not think it would come again. And then, there! Drifting from the woods far beyond the fallow fields came the high trembling note. Ghost pricked up his ears and loped forward, racing for the stone walk near the gate and bridge.

Jon followed behind. The wind was bitter now, biting at his face and ears and bare chest. The stone was so cold under his feet that he could have been walking on snow. He felt still in a dream as he stood before the gap of the crenel and peered out into the soft darkness.

Ghost put his paws to the stone as he had the windowsill, and showed the soft white fur of his throat to the wind, the falling moonlight. They might have been the only ones awake in the whole world.

Silent silent silent, Ghost howled back. Whoever lingered in the woods, alone but for their own quaking voice, could not hear him and Jon’s throat prickled, sore.

The wind picked up now, from their backs. From the sea. The sound would carry. Jon clenched his hand.

He did not hear Alys approach until she was at his elbow, her eyes wide in the dark and not at all sleepy. The hounds in the kennel yard were still baying. Sigorn was a step behind her; he draped a fur around her thin shoulders and turned his own face to the night.

Ghost slipped down again to stand on four feet. He scratched at the stone ledge like it might give way before him, ran a distance down the stone walk, then came back panting and huffing silently. His whole body was thick with tension. Jon dipped, for a bare second, against the warm beat of his mind, and felt the panic in his chest.

“Easy, wolf,” he said hoarsely, but Ghost wouldn’t settle. The howl was dying now, dipping into nothingness and wind-sigh, and Ghost went to the ledge again and threw back his head.

They could have been alone, the two of them. They could have been the only ones left alive in the whole world. Alys’ cry startled them both. Jon jumped and Ghost folded his ears back, his teeth bared.

“ _Awwoooooo!_ ” she cried and her hands were cupped to her mouth to help carry the sound. “ _Awwoooooooo!_ ” she called again, a thin weak sound. She did not sound a wolf. The darkness turned her young again, the cold. She sounded like a girl; she sounded like the girl who had taken her grey horse and rode it nearly to death to reach the Wall.

And then Sigorn, his voice was deeper and stronger. In the shadows, his face was a boy’s again. Six-and-ten and the madness passed between them. “ _Awwoooo! Awwoooooo!_ ” Sigorn shouted into the air.

In the woods, far away, so far it was unreachable, the howl came back. A single cry, deep and alone. Alone and lonely. 

Jon’s throat was empty. He could not open his mouth. He wasn’t sure what sound would come from it, a wolf’s howl or a man’s scream. He was struck silent, and Ghost beside him, and they stood mute as the Karstarks filled the air with cries and the wolf cried back.

After a moment, breathless, Alys grabbed at his arm and said, “She wants to hear you.”

Her eyes were wild. They were not a woman’s eyes, or a lady’s. The moon silvered them as thoroughly as the light would silver any animal’s. They had been wolves once too. Jon lifted his hands to his mouth, her hand falling off his arm, and a noise poured out of him.

If Ghost could speak, this. 

Could a wolf warg into a man? Ghost filled his throat, his mouth. He had never made a sound until now, until he poured himself out of Jon and into the night air.

_Where are you? Where are you? Who are you? I’m here, I’m me, I’m here._

His throat burned. The cry came out of him and left into the air, and Jon was left breathless and wild behind it. Ghost was a part of him and he was a part of Ghost and far away the wolf howled back.

_I’m here, I’m here, I’m here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: The alt title for this is _Everyone Has A Headcold_ because while editing this, I hit Control F for "snort" and removed like 17 instances. Yikes!
> 
> A little housekeeping issue I have--How are you feeling about long chapters? Like, an 18k chapter. I arranged all the sections in scenes of three, so there's not really a good place to break 'em, but if the word count is being a drag, I'd love to know so I can try my best to fix that
> 
> If any of you wanna chat about the story, point out a horrible misspelling or grammar mistake, talk about the ship, or just chat in general please feel free to drop a comment (I promise to respond! I swear!) or email me at ao3throwaway27@gmail.com. (Possibly there will be a tumblr link here soonish as well) 
> 
> And as always, thank you for reading/ bookmarking/ kudos/ subscribing/ commenting. Y'all are great and I love you!
> 
> Part Three scheduled for 6/25


	3. Chapter 3

> It gave him an uneasy feeling. Braavosi coin would allow the Night's Watch to buy food from the south when their own stores ran short, food enough to see them through the winter, however long it might prove to be. A long hard winter will leave the Watch so deep in debt that we will never climb out, Jon reminded himself, but when the choice is debt or death, best borrow. He did not have to like it, though. And come spring, when the time came to repay all that gold, he would like it even less.   
>  —Jon IX, _A Dance with Dragons_

  


> Iron, but unforgotten,  
>  Iron, dawn-hearted,  
>  Ever-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages.
> 
> See it come forth in blossom  
>  From the snow-remembering heart  
>  In long-nighted January,  
>  In the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and the Etna snow-wind through the long night.  
>  —D.H. Lawrence, _Almond Blossom_

  


### Part Three: An Arrow in the Night

THE day was not easy after that. He washed, he dressed, he went to the yard and relearned with a tourney sword how to fight a man armed with a spear. But it did not settle him. He went to break his fast with restlessness heavy in his body. It dragged at his bones; it gnawed the underside of his ribs.

Alys was at her little table when her woman brought Jon in. She bade him sit and he went, careful not to catch her eye. He did not want to see what look hung there. He did not think he could bear it if it was pity.

Ghost, too, was unhappy. He had not wanted to leave the battlements; he had stood for a long time at the open gate, hesitant to go out but unable to leave it be. Now he curled on the rug without even a look at the breakfast trays and tucked his tail over his nose. 

Finally Alys said, “I have never seen him off his feed before.”

Jon had, but only the once. Deep in the far North by the Wall, when their armies, triumphant but barely, turned to go south. Ghost had realized that he would go alone and it had broken both their hearts. Jon shrugged, not wanting to speak, and Alys leveled a heavy sigh at him. 

“I thought to save it until later,” she said. “But who am I to command you, the king?”

He looked up at this. She was not looking at him, only out the open windows to where the wind had eased again to cool kisses as it rushed the keep. Jon thought she might have shadows under her eyes, or some sleepiness at rising well before the dawn, but she was as fresh-faced and bright-eyed as he had ever seen her.

The darkness that had made them young was gone. She turned back to him and caught his eye and Alys was not full of pity, but something beyond that. The look she gave him spoke to deep understanding. Alys, who had waited out the war in Karhold, who had filled the sky with black wings, who had refused to let Jon be, until he was resigned and perhaps even a little happy at her nagging.

“You’ll go to the orchards today,” she said and set her fork aside. “Sigorn will take you.”

Who was she to command a king, indeed? It was almost enough to make him smile. Jon said distantly, hearing his mouth make the words, “I do not think—”

“You’ll like it,” Alys said and turned her eyes to the window again. “They’re blooming, the almond trees. The first ones to come to flower every Spring, and you cannot feel poorly when you go among them. I can smell them even now,” and she tipped her nose to the air like a hound trying to catch a scent.

All Jon could smell was salt, and the scent of the food, and the far and distant perfume that rested like honey on his tongue. He did not have the spirit in him to turn her aside. He said only, “As you wish it, lady.”

They lingered long over the table, sitting in silence and picking like birds at their food. Jon felt almost too heavy to move, even as his leg jigged up and down. It was a relief when Sigorn came through the door, clapped Jon’s shoulder, and went to kiss his wife.

Davos came after him and under the melancholy, Jon felt faint surprise.

“Your Grace,” Davos said, offering a bow, and there was the look Jon hated so, speaking to madness and pity of it.

“Lord Hand,” he said back with a nod of his head. He had been summoned then by one of their hosts, and Jon could forgive it because he knew it was out of love for him. 

He made an effort to sit up straighter and change his face to something mild. “What news?” Jon asked before Davos could say ought, hoping there would be none.

“Silence,” Davos said, his own relief plain for all that he had argued for welcoming the Braavosi with open arms. “And it is a blessing. I cannot imagine the chaos the Greatjon will cause before our return.”

He had agreed to go with Jon to Karhold, Jon supposed. Davos had gone so far as to make the plans himself. He looked out the window to the morning sun and made himself set aside the small grudge he had been nursing.

Alys turned from her husband. “The Greatjon,” she said and raised her brows. “Are the Umbers making trouble for you?”

“I bade him sit the throne until I return,” Jon said. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. His skin felt tender with newness. He half-wanted to climb out of it. “I think the keep will still be standing when we go back, as strongly built as Winterfell is, but I cannot imagine a better welcome than that.”

Her look was quick and curious. Jon did not want to speak on it. Not yet. Not yet. Not for four more days. He said, “It does not matter. Come and join us, Davos. There’s too much food here for two or three, but I think four can manage it.”

“No thank you, Your Grace,” Davos said politely. “I ate in the hall.”

“Don’t pretend you’re going to finish your plate either,” Alys said. Her eyes were quick, bright. They made Jon feel old. “You’re not hungry for anything on this table.”

To hear it said so plainly made Jon uncomfortable. “Mayhaps,” he said and made to rise. Sigorn was gathering his own breakfast, bread and meat and soft cheese he wrapped in a cloth.

“We go, huh,” he said companionably. “Go look lots of trees.”

His eye roll this time spoke volumes as to how high he thought of the errand but Alys was determined. She slapped at his arm and said, “Don’t come back until you’ve studied every one. I shall question you on the health of them all.”

Jon turned away while they kissed. He did not grudge it of them, he loved them both too well for that, but that strange restlessness still gnawed at his bones. His skin was too tight; his body ached. 

He would be glad to be outdoors, he thought, and whistled Ghost up from his rug.

Those wise red eyes peered at him but the wolf made no move to rise. Jon knelt down and took Ghost’s blocky head in his hands. “I want to let him go into the fields,” he said to Alys as he stroked Ghost’s fur. “I’ll pay if he takes any livestock, but I have never known him to worry a sheep or a cow. Nor a person, unless he was in some danger. It should be safe. Might I—”

“I am not so great a fool as to think I can keep a direwolf penned,” Alys said. “Let him go where he wills, cousin.”

“Aye,” Jon said wryly, “so long as _I_ go where I am bid.”

Sigorn snorted. “We go look trees,” he said and rolled his eyes again. “Better than here, huh?”

He was out of Alys’ arm-reach before she could smack him again, and she made a face at his back as Sigorn left the room. Jon bowed to her and followed, Davos almost as light-footed as Ghost at his side.

“And how are you today, Your Grace?” Davos asked as they went down to the stables.

“Well enough,” Jon lied. “Do not worry yourself on my account, Lord Hand. I will bear up.” For four more days, and then Jon thought he might settle again for another long year. It was a grim thought, a grim look, but not one he wanted to make Davos privy to.

“There is naught else I can do,” Jon assured him and rubbed a hand across his face.

Davos gave him a troubled look, but he let the matter drop. T’was good of him, to be such a friend to Jon, when he might have simply resigned his post and gone home after the war.

Jon was lucky in his pack this time around. He touched the wooden wolf where it sat in his pocket and left the others to saddle the horses. Ghost was walking slowly, tiredly, and Jon took him to the gate.

They went half-way across the bridge before Jon knelt again. Ghost shoved his head against Jon’s chest and he placed a hand on Ghost’s back. “Might be you’ll find whoever went a-howling out there,” Jon said, ruffling his fur. “Be nice to your little cousins, same as I’m nice to mine.” 

Two days indoors had done him favors; he was more white than brown again. Jon couldn’t imagine anyone who would laugh at him now, with those wise red eyes catching the sunlight, bright as any rubies, bright as any blood.

Ghost sniffed at his neck, then licked it, and Jon laughed. It surprised him, the sound, but Ghost only snuffled closer and tried to bathe Jon’s face. 

“Go on, wolf,” Jon said and gave a shove to that thickly-furred broad chest to make Ghost stop. “Go and see. Might be there’s something worth finding out there.”

He waited until Ghost was down the road, when Jon’s keen crow eyes had lost him to the dip and rise of the little hills, then he went back to the stables.

Karhold was not on the Grey Cliffs itself, but the orchards stretched from the animal pastures hugging the outside walls of the keep—lesser built and not quite so tall, no guard posts or narrow slits for archers—all the way to the head of the cliffs. The walls did not need so much protection, being on the far side of the river and facing as they did away from the road. The land they overlooked was a good swathe, enough that it might take half a day to walk the length and breadth of it.

And Alys was right. The almond trees, Karhold’s finest crop, were blooming.

Jon had seen trees in bloom before, but nothing like this. If the North denied meeting Spring in the fields and in the gardens, it was only so that it could wed it and bed it so thoroughly here in the orchard land. 

The trees marched like sentinels towards the cliff head in neat rows, but that was the only tame thing about them. The rest of it was sweet wildness. Huge clouds of blossoms, so pale a pink that they might have been white, clung to each branch and bough. They trembled in the sea breeze and fell around him softly, coating the new grass pushing up out of the ground.

Sigorn and Davos rode ahead, unastonished, arguing faintly over whether or not Karhold might someday have a port and harbor. But Jon could not make his horse move faster than a slow meander, and when it dropped its head to stop and crop at the grass he held the reins limply and let it.

The air was spiced honey and seawater and the full richness of the perfume he’d caught only in distant diluted drafts from Karhold’s open windows. He could breathe it a hundred years and never tire of it. The scent was so thick that it ran across his tongue and he swallowed it down with every gasping breath.

The falling blossoms brushed against his hair and cheeks as lightly as butterflies and Jon held out his hand to catch one. The trees obliged him with another delicate shower, falling just so around him as if the flowers themselves wanted to be seen. One fell right into the cradle of his palm. The soft blush of color led to a deep red heart, rich as blood. 

Jon had seen the workings of old magic. He had flown on dragon back. But this, this took his breath away. Here the North and the Spring cleaved together as tightly as lovers, making snow from the trees that carried no cold and lingered long and sweet in the air, the branches, the grass.

Davos and Sigorn had turned to ride along the river, taking the orchard road further north. Jon let them go and took up the reins again, urging his horse towards the cliffs.

There were no words. There were no words. He could not imagine writing this in a letter or describing it to a man. Some things were kept for himself.

When the ground started to slope gently up, he dismounted and tied the reins to a low branch. The horse was content enough to be left behind; it rooted through the layers of petals on the ground to reach the grass.

He did not want to be alone but Jon did not think he could bear company either. 

There were foot-paths in the grass that led to the switch-backs trails staggering down the cliff face. They were scattered across the length of the Grey Cliffs, Jon knew, and some of them no more visible than a deer trail. 

He stopped near the closest footpath, not intending to go on, and looked down the long curved line of the coast. Not so far away from him, dropped precariously near the edge of the cliff, was a pile of heavy fractured rocks. Boulders, Jon thought, laid to mark an easier path, but they were the same sturdy grey as the stones of Karhold. Alys had not been lying.

The Shivering Sea had been a pallid grey last time he saw it. Now it was as bright as a jewel, tossing sunlight back up from each cresting wave that crashing into the rocky beach below. Jon sat under one of the almond trees, his back to the rough bark, and watched it for a while.

His hands were empty. They ached a little, the burnt one made tight into a fist. It was work to coax it into relaxing, but when it did he dug into his pocket, took out the wood wolf, and hid it within the circle of his fingers. Those amber eyes were gold in the sunlight, almost alive.

Almost. They could not truly see and it pained Jon to think on that, to look at them. He tucked his fist up to his mouth, his own lips to the back of his hand, and tried to think of nothing.

He did not let himself bring it to mind very often, like the word itself was precious steel and prone to tarnish if used too often, but now her name chased itself around and around inside his skull. She would have loved this—she would have been speechless with delight at it; the grass, the sea, the heady perfume and soft spill of the flowers.

They would not need to speak to know it from each other. She wore her heart on her face to him; she could read a thought off Jon’s own face with only a glance. They would not need words. Some things could be kept for them alone.

 _Arya_ , and it was like a wound to think it. To finally furnish a face and a name to the ghost he carried with him. _Arya, Arya. Where are you?_

What had kept her away from Jon so long, that she would be almost six-and-ten now and still without return? He was certain in his bones that she was alive; he was certain in his bones that she had grown as impossibly wild and sweet and lovely as she was in his dreams. Only a few days’ time and she would reach her majority, the middle month of the year, the middle week. The day and night of the dark of the moon.

He would have given anything to have her there with him. Anything. He did not need his eyes to see, not if he had the sound of her laughter. Let the gods take his hands if he could but feel the press of her lips to his face as she showered him with kisses.

Later he could not say if it was some bare glance or scent in the air that alerted him to their coming. Mayhaps the way of their steps, or how they froze to see him sitting there, that was what stirred up the deep instinct in him. 

Jon could not say if it was being disturbed itself, the animal prowl of his anger that he was finally to be alone with his thoughts of her and here came others to steal even that little piece, that made him scramble to his feet, casting the wooden wolf aside and drawing his sword as he did when he saw the men come from the orchard path, both as fleet-footed and quiet as deer in the brush.

But he was not wrong in it, never mind the reason Jon took Longclaw in hand and bared his teeth at them. Almost even before he moved they were dropping whatever was piled in their arms and pulling free swords of their own.

To raise your steel to your liege lord was death; Jon did not know if it was the same or t’was worse to draw against your king. But he did not stop to ask them. He had not survived so long by carrying strange thoughts into battle. 

They, too, did not speak before they met blade to blade. On this Jon was certain. On this he would stand firm if questioned. There was no cry for mercy. There was no call for quarter. They came at him snarling and he met them as the same. 

It was not the meeting of men; it was the meeting of animals with iron teeth.

In the four seconds before they met, the budding flower of battle madness making his thoughts clear and his mind roll slowly, Jon noted this: they were ragged and filthy, their eyes wild and limned round with white, but if they had starved it was not for long. The left one hefted a bastard sword and his chest under the rags of his clothes was thick with muscle. The right one had a longsword only and rust pitted it, crawling down the length. He held it like a man who’d learned it as a boy.

Too, he held it like he was afraid.

“Fuck!” longsword said fast and frightened to the bastard sword, “Fuck!” but got no response.

Jon met the bastard sword first. Longclaw crashed into the lesser blade and Jon’s arms and teeth shook with the force of keeping off the blow. The strike was as loud as drums, the ringing shriek of steel. He was deaf to the noise after that first blow; his blood rushed in his ears. 

“Kill him, Melwyn! Kill him!” the longsword cried, standing well away and trembling, speaking in that _stupid_ fucking Southron accent, all emphasis on the wrong parts of the words—

Jon and the bastard sword met again, another furious blow, and this one was clever; they locked in place a single grim moment, both of them straining and Jon might have forced the bastard sword back—

Longsword, creeping like a deer up to the right of them. Jon jerked Longclaw away, took a wild swing to force the bastard sword back and barely met the longsword with a ringing crack of blade to blade.

They hacked at each other, panting breaths fast in Jon’s chest, but he had an advantage; all men trained south of the Neck fought the same fucking way—

Jon fended off a sloppy blow and was a bare second too late to knock off longsword’s head.

Up close the rust was worse. It crept down the length of the sword and puddled around the pommel. Longclaw was hungry. They swung at each other again and its keen edge bit half an inch into the weakened steel. The longsword man dragged his blade back with a dismayed cry.

“Fucking cunting hell!” he howled and shook his sword like that might heal the deep notch.

Bastard sword had his balance back. Jon moved to the left, putting his body between himself and longsword and peeled his lips back from his teeth. 

Their reach was matched. 

He swung at Jon and Jon knocked the blow away, knew the moment he’d done it he’d swung Longclaw too far, and jerked back a bare moment too late to avoid the longsword as he cut deep to the meat of Jon’s arm.

The shout that burst out of his throat was from surprise alone; he didn’t truly feel the blow even as the blood started to drip down his arm.

Longsword didn’t stay to try again. He went back to circling them, panting lightly and trying to get behind Jon. Jon knew it, saw him from the corner of his eye, and could not spare a moment to take himself from bastard sword, who was waiting and watching for another chance.

The blood dripped from Jon’s arm. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

The gods were with him. The gods were with him. T’was his own keen sense, or a borrowed wolf-sense, or all the luck he had ever been denied before. Jon made the bastard sword stagger back with another wild strike, turned, and sheered off the longsword blade three inches from the pommel with a shriek of steel and rust.

The rust fell to the ground almost like snowflakes. Jon’s swing kept going; he buried Longclaw into the man’s neck. His blood was up now. He kicked the body from the end of his sword and wheeled around, heart hammering, just in time to see the arrow grow and blossom from the bastard sword’s shoulder.

The bastard sword might have kept his blade if he held it two-handed, but he was used to a shield in the other, or else over-confident; his hand spasmed from the blow and his sword fell to the ground. He screamed from the pain, a high shrill shriek like a seabird.

It was over after that. The man knew it plain; his eyes were grim as Jon brought Longclaw back and relieved him of his head in a short swift blow.

He stood panting as the body crumpled, feeling like ten years had passed. Feeling like a hundred years had passed. It could not have been more than two minutes. His face was wet with the blood spray.

The sword sagged in his hand. Jon wiped his arm across his eye and cheek.

When the noise came, the crackle of grass and rock from the footpath, he turned to bid the archer well. His mouth was already set in the words when he understood what his eyes told him.

A third man, dressed in rags and filthy. A sword in his hand.

Jon raised his own sword, his heart hammering and crashing. A trap, a snare and he’d put his paw in it. The man said stupidly, “You killed my mates!” his voice breaking on the word, and an arrow drove itself through his eye.

From an angle. Jon’s brain took note, coldly and keenly, even as he shifted back in surprise. The long white shaft was bright in the sunlight, the feather fletching as black as a raven wing. 

And then another shot, planted into the man’s neck. The angle—his mind hung itself there. The man stumbled back with the force of the third blow, a solid strike to his chest, and he tumbled off the path and down the cliff face, but Jon was already turning. 

Not to watch the man crash to the rocks below. He was finished before he even reached them, a sick wet smack that the wind picked up and bore to Jon’s ears.

Jon turned to the other rocks, cracked Northron stone left at the very edge of the cliffs. It was, he thought, enough to hide a man behind if he was small and quiet and quick.

He should have tried to fade into the trees for cover. T’was an expert shot, a beautiful shot that caused the bastard sword to lose his life. Jon’s own body had blocked part of the way.

He heard shouting, faint and far away. He took a step towards the boulders.

The angle—it wailed inside his head. He did not know why that, why the thought snarled and bit at him so fiercely. From the boulders, aye, and—

He’d faced the rocks when he killed the longsword. He’d put his back to them when he turned, square to the bastard sword but for the man’s arm, his shoulder. 

The eye, the throat, the chest. The angle.

Davos was shouting faintly, “Lad! Lad!”

Nothing moved but the low scrubby grass that picked its way up the soft slope of dirt that age and wind and storm had mounded up around the base of the boulders. Northron stone, the same stone as had built Karhold. Strong and steady and true against all attacks.

The gods were with him.

Jon turned his back to them and wiped Longclaw on the grass. The blossoms that fell to scatter around the bodies, around the proving ground of the fight, were red in more than heart now. One clung to the steel of his sword and he picked it free before he returned Longclaw to its scabbard.

His pack had left their horses behind. Sigorn, younger, came first from the orchard path at a dead run. He stopped, seeing Jon, and turned in a fast circle, his eyes wide and his sword steady in his hand. 

Jon could not speak to what Sigorn saw in the scuffed dirt, the lay of the bodies, the wide spills of blood. The headless body was staining the ground red; its neck was weeping like a new-made widow.

Davos came just after, his sword in his hand as well, and Jon did not have even a moment to reassure him. He almost crashed into Jon with how quickly he went to him, patting roughly at Jon’s chest and shoulders. “You’re well?” he demanded roughly as he slapped at Jon’s jerkin to check for tears. His eyes were wild. 

“They did not—”

Jon could not fend Davos off his arm quick enough. He was not thinking, not seeing his Lord Hand; his mind lingered on the pile of stone to his back. He growled low in his throat as his arm flared with sudden pain and Davos pulled away his hand away with a jerk. 

His short fingers, and they were dyed wetly red as any ruby.

“Only that,” Jon said before the barrage of concern could start again. The wound ached in big pulses, the same beat as his crashing heart, and he gave the arm a roll to keep it from stiffening. “A small cut,” he said and stepped away a little. “It matters not.”

“More?” Sigorn asked. He was done appraising the ground; his head turned down to look at the bodies. He kicked over the longsword’s body, which had fallen to its front, and considered the dirty face. 

Jon did not want him to look so closely at the other body, not yet. He was spared having to think of a reason to stop it; he could not think for the hairs raised at the back of his neck, the gooseflesh down his spine. 

It was not the feeling of prey that clung to Jon, burrowed deep under his skin, chillingly cold and deeply good.

Sigorn spat on that dirty face and looked up.

“No,” Jon said. The world seemed very cool and clear in that bare moment. He took in the sweet scent-taste of the almond blossoms and said, “There was a third, but he fell from the cliff.”

The _angle_. His mind was working now, slowly. He lied, “I know not if he lives. Perhaps we should check. I would sorely like to speak with him.”

“Aye,” Sigorn said and bared his teeth. He went to the start of the footpath and leaned over the edge. 

Davos held Jon back before he could follow, his hand tight still on Jon’s shoulder. The wet scent of Jon’s blood clung to them both. Jon could almost taste it when he breathed. 

“We’ll go back to the keep,” Davos said. “Summon the guards, some Thenns, whoever Sigorn wants. And then you’ll let a maester look at your arm.”

Jon shook his head. The hairs at the back of his neck were standing high. “The third came from the cliffs,” he said. “If there are others, I would know it now. And I cannot leave Sigorn to look alone. Alys would forgive me many things, but not that.”

Many a time they had crashed heads together over Jon’s safety. But Davos was not a man to leave his fellows behind. “You’ll come down _after_ me,” he said and gave Jon a shake.

“Aye, if it settles you any,” Jon said. He felt keenly aware of the boulders behind him; he felt giddy with the knowledge of it, struck green and stupid by the sight of the arrows flying through the honey-sweet air. His heart crashed and pounded in his chest. “Shall we?” he asked and offered Davos a courtly bow just to irritate him into action.

Davos went, scowling and careful on the sandy grass, and Jon followed two steps after. He did not look behind himself. He could not trust his instinct in that moment. He did not know what he would do if he saw anything there.

The footpath was not an easy climb. Twice they had to turn their backs to the rough stone and inch along it and Davos, who was not ill of heights but not exactly easy with them either, was sweating down his face when they reached the rocky shore.

Sigorn was already standing over the body. He prodded it, looked up at Jon, and quirked up the side of his mouth. “Arrows, huh,” he said.

The dead man had fallen on his back. The arrow in the man’s neck was broken, the shaft hanging in two pieces and the feathers on it a ruin. But the other two, from his eye and his chest, stuck out as proud as any banner.

“Aye,” Jon said. He swallowed down the laugh that threatened to come out. His was not a face made for smiling, but now it threatened him at every moment to break into a grin.

“Arrows, which is odd,” he could not keep himself from quipping, “as I only carry the sword.”

Davos was giving him a look now, narrow-eyed and frowning. Then he turned it to the cliffs. If not for the trail, winding and treacherous as it was, Jon might have been worried about the man darting back up and catching the archer.

If not for the archer, small and quiet and quick and _clever_. Jon soothed himself, three deep breathes coated in salt-water and the scent-tang of his own blood, and forced his mind to turn back.

Sigorn was bent over the body. “Good hunting,” he said. He took up the arrow shaft from the chest, bracing his foot on the man’s ribs, and yanked it free in a little spray of blood.

They looked at it in his hand for a long moment. Jon could not calm his heart. He had suspected, but to see—

Finally Davos said like wild horses had dragged it from him, grudging and bitter, “Your Grace, I believe that is a weirwood shaft.”

The wood, where it was not dripping rubies onto the sand, was white as bone. “Could be,” Jon said. He should have felt nerves, or unhappiness, or some better sense of unease, but all that passed through him was a fast tensing of his muscles and an urge he checked before he could act on it, the wanting to turn his eyes towards the head of the cliffs.

A part of him, the ungentle part, a part of which Jon as a man was a little ashamed, was glad it would come to a fight. The Braavosi were so determined to snare him that they’d sent the archer and Jon’s heart beat so quickly in his chest with the knowing of it, that he could now show them what all his other enemies had learned. 

Direwolves could not be lead. They could not be forced. They had supped in the South once too often now to prance along and put their paws in traps.

“And I suppose the feathers are swan?” Davos asked. _His_ focus was on the arrow. He held out his hand and Sigorn passed it over.

“Like the war,” Sigorn said thoughtfully as the arrow left his hand.

Davos took on a pinched look. “Like the Braavosi favor,” he said, though as far as Jon knew, only one House of Braavos had use of weirwood and black swan feather arrows.

Davos turned it and examined the fletching in the bright sunlight. “Black as any damn bird that swims in their canals,” he said at last in small disgust. “Your Grace—”

Jon heard him but barely. He was not paying attention. He was turned to look down the beach. There were small dark mouths on the face of the cliffs. He wondered if the caves hiding behind them were any larger than the openings. He wondered if there were larger caves further along.

Three men, ragged and filthy and furious.

“Your Grace!” Davos snapped. His eyes were stern, unamused, when Jon turned back to him. “Have you any thoughts on this?” he demanded when all Jon did was raise his brows.

“Aye,” he said easily. “I think I need more time in the yard. When the stitches come out, I would fight two at a time until I have the knack of it back.”

Davos sputtered, but Sigorn laughed. “Are there sizeable caves there?” Jon asked him, pointing down the beach. “The third man came up, not too quick but quick enough, when he heard his friends die.”

“Some,” Sigorn said. He gave the body another thoughtful kick. “I take some men, before the tide. Go and see, track them up.”

“Excellent,” Davos said. He’d put his sword away before he took the arrow; now he latched his free hand to Jon’s shoulder again and said tightly, “While you do that, the king will have someone tend to his arm.”

It hurt, but not in an overwhelming way. Jon rolled his shoulder, swung the arm so it would not stiffen, and said, “It’s well enough for now.”

“Your Grace,” Davos said again in the same tone as he said _Lad_ , and there was something about his voice, tight and unhappy, that bade Jon give him a longer look.

He was afraid, Jon realized. The white around his eyes had not disappeared and his hand with the arrow shook a little. 

Jon did not think Davos was afraid _of_ him, for if he was then he would have shown it long before now. Three men—two, truly—if you only counted the ones at Jon’s own hand, and it was the smallest slaughter he had ever done. 

No, like as not Davos was scared _for_ Jon, which Jon could understand, seeming as it did that he could not even fight two when once before he had taken on six with attention to spare.

“We’ll go back,” he said finally. He did not like to unduly vex Davos. It seemed a poor trade when he spent so much time trying to help Jon. “The lady needs be told, though I am ashamed to lay this at her door when we came here in friendship and good faith.”

Sigorn snorted. He gave the body a final kick and said sourly, “My land, huh. My beach. My trees.” And then he spit on the dead man’s face.

There seemed nothing left to say. They took the path up the cliff, Davos stepping carefully and a little white in his face, and then they paused at the head of the cliff, all of them staring.

They all of them stared, but Jon was the only one to laugh, a big bark that burst out of him and sent a flock of gulls fleeing from the cluster of boulders further down.

T’was Ghost with the bodies, nosing among them curiously, his tail in the air like a flag. He looked up, his whole muzzle wet with blood, and Jon went to him and put a hand to the soft fur behind his ears.

“Some guard you are,” he said. “Coming after they’re already dead. What kept you away so long, wolf?”

Those wise red eyes turned up to him, Ghost’s red tongue lolling. _You handled them well enough, Your Grace_ , he seemed to say. _It does a man good to get his blood up once in a while_.

“Aye, it does,” Jon said. “Off with you now,” and he cuffed Ghost’s thick neck. “Leave the man-eating to your sister—”

The crash of his heart, fast and steady and true as the waves on the rocks down below, stuttered. Nymeria. The firecord wolf—

He touched his pocket out of reflex. Empty, aye, because he’d had it in his hand when the men had come.

An ill feeling came over him. Jon went to the base of the almond tree where he’d sat before and he knelt to feel among the grass. “Your Grace,” Davos said, a step behind him. “Perhaps we might—”

“No,” Jon said. It was not near the base of the tree, or hidden in the flowers. He combed through the carpet of them carefully and Ghost came to sniff at the furrowed rows Jon’s fingers left behind.

“No bow, no man,” Sigorn said, returned from the boulders. “No steps.”

He sounded impressed. Jon muttered back, “Aye,” and moved a little farther out. He had not lost it. He had not. It was among the grass and the flowers somewhere, or among the blood, but it was there and he would find it.

The others did not leave. Jon could not ask them to help. The words shrivelled and died, stillborn, in his throat.

“Hey,” Sigorn said and crouched near him. He cocked his head at Jon and raised his brows. Sigorn kept his lips over his teeth. He blocked the way; Jon could not move around him. 

“My wolf,” Jon said. The words fell out of his mouth before he could stop them. His heart hammered out of rhythm, waves disturbed by something more powerful than the heady pull of the moon. “The firecord wolf,” he said. “I had it in hand when they came and now I cannot—”

Sigorn did not question Jon, only rose quickly and went to peer around the bodies, turning them over and poking the toe of his boot through the blood. Ghost was close to Jon’s heels; he nuzzled his cool wet nose to Jon’s cheek.

Three days and he’d lost it. Could nothing be left to him? Everything he would keep in safety, the wolf and Karhold and the orchard so beautiful and queerly veiled in blossoms like so much impossible snow—

There was blood over everything. It dripped down his arm, fell across his fingers, soaked the blanket of the blossoms. His breath was coming quicker. He could not stop it. The hand he had put to the grass curled slowly into a fist.

Sigorn put a hand to his shoulder, waited past the startle that worked through Jon’s body, and jerked Jon to his feet. “Hey,” he said again, and his own eyes were wild. He shook him and Jon tensed like a wolf waiting to spring.

“Bow shot?” Sigorn demanded. He steered Jon from the tree and to the waiting bodies. The bastard sword was done bleeding now. His head was a few feet away and those grim eyes stared up at Jon accusingly.

The arrow in his shoulder was gone. The wet red hole it left behind was only so much meat. The archer had paused to take his arrow; he had paused to take something else.

Nothing ever came without a price.

Jon had never felt mad before. Not after those first three days of his waking, when he was busy working the instincts of a wolf out of a man’s mind and body. Now, though, he felt like a chained animal taken off the stake. A growl came up out of his chest and spilled out of his mouth.

The wooden Nymeria when he held it in the moonlight was silver and gilt, far too fine for Jon’s rough hands. It was fine enough to be a treasure. It was fine enough to be taken as payment.

To Jon, t’was well worth three lives. Well worth a dozen more.

The world went strangely cold for a moment, iciness settling into his veins, shards of it drifting through his blood. Stark blood was made of ice; there was so little of it left; it was precious. The archer had not wanted to watch another spill it, but it was not kindness that bade him draw his arrows back against the bowstring.

Everything had a pride, but he had not asked Jon to pay it, only took, and took greedily, that which was not his. 

The thought of another hand touching the wooden wolf made him burn with rage, the burn of ice to bare skin, a burn settled deep and heavy into his bones.

 _You had your hunt_ , Jon thought. _Aye, and now I have mine. Give me a day and then let us see who found their quarry faster and brought it down the better of us two_.

The wind coming off the distant waves kissed his face. “We’ll go back to the castle,” Jon said. He turned his face back to Sigorn, who stood taut himself. He took hold of Sigorn’s shoulder, shook the tightness from it, and left a bloody handprint behind. 

“When you look at the caves, look for two places men have been sleeping,” Jon said. “I want that archer found.”

“Aye,” Sigorn said, steady. Willing. Davos was watching them both, his face pinched and he rubbed with his opposite knuckles the fingers of his short hand.

Ghost knocked against Jon’s side and Jon made himself put his lips back over his teeth. “With me, Ghost,” he said and turned to the orchard path.

“I AM sorry for this,” Alys said again as she dabbed at the blood splashed across Jon’s face. Her hands were gentle, never mind how wroth she was, and Jon shut his eyes and submitted to the wet rag with little fuss.

“It’s no matter,” he said again and paused to grit his teeth as the maester dug the needle into the flesh of his arm. “I am well enough,” he went on after a moment, when the silence stretched long, broken only by the wet sound of the silk stitching as the maester pulled it through. He opened his eyes again and seeing her face was not eased, added, “T’was just a little cut.”

It did not soothe her. “You were attacked,” Alys said a little wildly, “on my land! Almost in my home! Mine own cousin, my king, my _guest_! I cannot, I do not know what I can say to you to make up for this!”

“Unless you hired those men yourself,” Jon said back, “there is nothing to forgive. It was only chance, Alys,” he lied, “that they came across me. They might not have even known who I was.”

He did not think they did, but he could not know, not until Sigorn found out more from the men, read from their camp and their things. But Alys was wroth already; Jon did not want her to worry. Any worrying was bad, he thought, for a lady who ought to be sitting with her feet tucked up on a cushion and only comfortable things at hand.

He paused again, pressed his lips together, and waited for the needle to finish its next pass. He’d denied the milk of the poppy, not wanting to muddle his head. If it was just the ragged men, he would have been happy enough drinking it and putting himself to bed afterwards. But the archer had complicated things.

“I would know who they are,” Alys said darkly and tilted up Jon’s chin to scrub at the blood that had dripped down his jaw and neck. Her hands did not belie the tension she felt but her look at the open window was sharp and hard as any sword.

If the men had been standing there on the sill, she would have flayed them with a glance. They had been wolves once too.

“We will know soon enough,” Jon soothed her, trying to get her hackles to settle again. “Sigorn will find them. I have seen that man track before; he could follow a white hare through a snowstorm.”

The hard lines of her face softened a little. “He’s a fine hunter,” Alys said. “All the Thenns are, and the better of my people for it. And you yourself, so I will admit to surprise that you did not go with him.”

“Lord Davos had the right of it not to let me,” Jon said. His spirit was high now that things were coming to a head; the knowledge of his new quarry soothed him. 

Jon was not a man who suited idleness well. It was not happiness exactly that was rushing through his veins, but it wasn’t unhappiness either. No, it was something in between the two, balancing delicately on the thin thread between joy and rage, that sent his blood to rushing and his mouth to smiling and his heart to crash and pound in his chest.

“I found you your first husband,” he quipped, “and I can find you another, but you will need try harder to replace a king if he’s knocked off in your own yard.”

She made an outraged noise at him, stood, and threw the rag at his chest. “You are a knave,” she declared as Jon caught the rag up and grinned at her. “I’ll put Sigorn on the throne and see how you like it then, Your Grace.”

The blood had trickled under his collar while it was still wet and it had pooled to dry at his collar bone. Jon scrubbed at it himself one handed as the air turned it to itching flakes. “Sigorn is welcome to it,” he said easily. “I will stay here and lead the Thenns and he may grapple with all the lords cluttering up my keep. It will be a fine break for me and a good challenge for him.”

Alys rolled her eyes. The maester murmured, stilling the muscles of Jon’s back with a cool touch, “Perhaps less movement, Your Grace.”

Jon submitted. He wanted the maester gone and quickly. He would take Alys into his confidences about the archer; he would need to. The arrows that had helped him would not be the last of it, Jon was certain.

He had learned patience during the war, but that did not mean he liked it. The maester put another stitch in and Alys poured herself another cup of honeyed milk.

She drank, then said after a moment, “I am almost more offended then wroth.” 

“It’s no stain on Karhold’s honor,” Jon assured her again. Now she was sitting on the sill of the window, with the cup in her hand, peering out with narrowed eyes. He would have asked her to move, that he might keep his view to the buildings of the keep, but for the deep lines of irritation gracing her brow.

Jon was not so foolish a man as to butt his will up against hers; they both had their blood up and t’was the bitch wolf, the bitch hound, that was the more dangerous when roused.

Arya had always been hellish when angry, sharp enough to cut to bone when offended, prickly about her pride. Alys was so much like her that Jon could expect nothing else.

“How certain is it,” she huffed, her brow furrowed darkly, “that they were the ones I spoke on, who stole the bread and chickens and milk? And I fed them! From my own kitchens I fed them! I put those strangers under my guest-right and they would repay me by bloodying my orchard and killing my king!”

“You need forgive yourself of that eventually,” Jon said. “Northron honor.” He was careful with the rag now, washing blood off his eyelashes as the maester poured vinegar over the stitching. “Better,” he went on at Alys’ quick curious look, “for you to feed an enemy by accident than let your own people starve.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’d rather Northron justice,” she said in a sour tone. Jon had no doubt, if she was not fat with child and skinny in her arms, that she would want to swing the sword herself.

“You have it too,” Sigorn said from the doorway. He paused to knock the sand off his boots, then crossed the room and kissed her soundly.

Jon looked away to give them a little privacy. The maester was prodding at his needlework now with bony fingers. “No sword work with this arm, Your Grace,” he said mildly. “I would say ten days before I could remove these, if you rest the muscle and sleep not on this side.”

“Aye,” Jon agreed and let the instruction pass from his mind. T’was only a cut, well-tended now, and not like to pain him.

The maester gave him a long-suffering look. Jon could not blame the man for it; he nursed the Thenns as well, who were some of the most stubborn people Jon had ever met. “Will you take milk of the poppy now?” the maester asked and Jon swallowed his grin as he shook his head _no_.

“It hurts only a little,” he said. “Better to keep the pain else I will move it too much.”

Now the old man looked as sour as if he’d bitten into an apple and found a worm. He was quick to wind the linen around the stitches, soaked in more vinegar to keep out any bad air. Jon let him and turned back to Alys and Sigorn.

Sigorn had his hand to the swell of her belly and his other to her waist as he leaned his forehead to hers and spoke softly. She was looking up at him, her face sweet and gentle, and the sunlight from the window cast them both in gold.

There was no sense of otherness in Jon as he watched them, not as there had been when he first came into her bower three days ago. He was not alone; he was not lonely. The archer was out there even now and the knowledge of it sent his blood rushing.

The maester had gathered up the bloody bandages, the basin and flask of vinegar, and his long wicked needle by the time Sigorn and Alys pulled away from each other. “Ten days, Your Grace,” he told Jon and bowed to his lord and lady as well before he quit the room.

Jon did not envy him any for leaving; Davos was still lurking in the maester’s tower, writing a furious letter to Winterfell demanding what news they had. And he would stay there, impatient and suspicious until he could watch the man send it himself.

It was foolish of him to worry so, as if they were under siege. Jon had dealt with the swordsmen. He would deal with the archer, too.

“One cave,” Sigorn said once the door was shut behind the maester. He tipped wine into a cup, brought it to Jon, and stood over him with his arms crossed until Jon sipped at it.

“Which cave?” Jon asked. He could not speak to what his face did in the waiting. He was washed with furious excitement. Ghost was on the rug, snoring with Sigorn’s hounds. It was Jon’s own mind that put into him the want to bite, to set his teeth into something soft and giving and sweet with blood.

“The men, huh,” Sigorn said and pulled up a chair. He held out an arm and Alys went and sat on his knee, tucked up to Sigorn and looking between him and Jon with confusion and concern.

“We think they were sleeping in a cave in the cliffs,” Jon explained. The wine was too sweet. He set it aside and shoved a hand through his hair.

“The men who attacked you,” Alys said. She turned to her husband and demanded, “You found their things?”

“Found some things,” Sigorn said. “Furs, huh. Fire. Bowls.” 

Jon had no doubt it had been a tidy little camp, well lived-in. They had been there some time, a s’en day at the least and likely longer. Had they come to wait for something? To wait for Jon? Or was it truly chance that brought them? The two men had their arms full, stolen furs and small bundles of food.

Likely the archer was as well-equipped, if not better.

Sigorn leveled a look at Jon. “Six bowls,” he said and his jaw was tight.

Jon had not expected that, but he could not make himself pretend to unhappiness. Three left, then. Did the archer know it, too? He stood and went to the window, looking out at the yards and buildings below. “No sign of the others?” he asked.

“Maybe they hear us come,” Sigorn said. “Maybe they go. Maybe they get shot.”

“Shot,” Alys said and Jon turned at the confusion in her voice.

“I did not just meet the men,” Jon said and his hand clenched and unclenched at his side. He wanted the wooden wolf back. He wanted to see the archer face to face. He wanted the sudden fierce moment of the fight and he wanted not to be interrupted this time.

“A bowman,” Sigorn said to Alys. He took her cup from her and set it aside, saying, “White arrow, black feathers.” And then to Jon, “Maybe not here for you. We look for him anyway, but he’s smarter. No footprints, no camp, nothing.”

Jon did not know how much Sigorn had told Alys of the War for the Dawn. Jon himself did not speak on it unless faced with the pressure of his own men’s wants, and even then he was quick to excuse himself at the first opportunity. But Sigorn must have told her something; she turned round eyes to Jon and opened her mouth, but found nothing to say.

“Aye,” Jon said. The heavy restlessness of the morning was gone. He wanted to move. The room was too small. Ghost was lifting his head, those wise red eyes peering up at him.

Jon did not know what those eyes said, if anything. He crossed the room and knelt and Ghost dug himself out from under the sleeping hounds and came to him.

“You’re sure,” Alys burst at last. Her eyes were still large in her face. “They were not just bleached from the sun, those arrows? And some of the free folk—they use black goosefeather! Mayhaps it was one of them.”

Ghost looked at Jon and Jon looked at Ghost and the sense of blood in their mouths grew. “You are a poor guard,” Jon said and pet the soft fur behind Ghost’s ears. “T’was you who could not leave them be during the war, and t’was you who let the archer take my wooden wolf.”

Could a wolf smile? Ghost’s eyes told him, _You know nothing, Jon Snow_.

“It was the same,” Jon said to Alys. “When Davos comes, I would have words with you both. I have not—”

If there was a time to forgive the madness and selfishness of other men, it was Spring. The scent of the almond blossoms came in from the window, the scent of the sea. If the scent of blood came with it and not just the spill from Jon’s wound, only Ghost could tell and he was turning away now, returning to his rug and his sleep.

“I have not exactly been truthful with you both,” Jon said finally. “I have not lied, aye, but I have not been plain about it either. T’was a Braavosi archer, my lady, and from the House of Black and White. He shot the man I was fighting and killed another who meant me ill before he even had a chance to raise his sword to me.”

“Anyone might use those arrows—” Alys said, then stilled.

Jon could not speak at to what his face did, that he betrayed himself to her and so quickly.

The disbelief dripped off her face like snowmelt dripped off a warm roof, and her expression changed to something else. Her eyes were narrowed at him now and her hand was tight on Sigorn’s arm.

She was riled; her teeth were ready and sharp.

“You met him,” Alys said sharply. “This archer. You met him on those cliffs, didn’t you, Jon Snow?”

“Not as such,” Jon said. He rose to his feet and crossed back to the window. Was he out there somewhere, a slim smear of shadow, watching in at them as they spoke? How many people were in Karhold? Too many for Alys would know all their faces? Enough that the Thenns would not notice another kneeler body among them?

“Either you met him or you didn’t!” Alys said. She tried to struggle to her feet and knocked away Sigorn’s hands when he went to help her. “What did he say? What possible reason did he give you for coming to Karhold, to my keep almost, uninvited? What say he about strewing my land with arrows so close to your own fat head?”

Her eyes blazed at him. “If I’d known how well you’d mind it, I would have tried to stop him,” Jon said, a little confused. “And I would have kept the men alive if I could, you know that. But is it so poor a thing, to help me when I needed it? Those men would have been my killers, my lady, and they were thieves aside.”

He could not speak to the look she gave him then. “I am not so concerned about _that_ ,” Alys said firmly. “It would have been nice to bring them to a fairer justice, but they lost their right to live the moment they attacked you! No, I am mostly troubled at you being hunted by such a man, coming to my land under a cover of darkness when he might have come as a friend and shown us his face--”

“They are assassins, and so not in the habit of simply walking in and introducing themselves,” Jon reminded her. “The War for the Dawn, I believe, is the first such time they have done so in known history. We named them friend for that, or ally at the least, but I doubt they are used to it.” 

Another amusing thought crept into his mind. “And they are faceless,” Jon went on. “It is in their very name. So I do not understand why you think this man would come to the keep and announce himself, or even had a face to show you.”

Sigorn laughed and it only served to make Alys angrier. She stomped a pace away from him, a hand to her belly, and bared her teeth at them both.

“Sigorn has told me of them, Jon!” she snapped. “Their magics. Their enchantments. It is a fine thing they did for us during the war, but they are an ill people, and I will not suffer one walking unknown and unannounced through my halls!”

“They are sorcerous,” Jon agreed. She looked at him so fiercely that he did not dare rile her further. “And they are sly and clever in ways we cannot understand. Next I meet him, I will tell him that the lady of the keep does not welcome him here, but I did not get the chance just now. I saw where he was hiding, and I kept the others from discovering him there, but I did not see him face to face.”

But he wanted to. Jon remembered to himself the ones that had come during the war, those hooded figures large and small who held themselves apart from all the other soldiers. Had the archer been among them? Had Jon met him there?

His words did not ease her. T’was hard for him to think, to concentrate. The window was open, the world outside peaceful, and his mouth was thick with blood.

“You saw where he was hiding,” Alys cried. She scrubbed a palm across her eyes. “You stood there for his shower of arrows—and the gods themselves the only thing to keep them from hitting you—and then you let him get away?”

“He was not shooting at me, my lady,” Jon said. The arrows had landed so precisely, so beautifully where they had meant to go. Jon had no doubt that he was not the intended target. “If he was,” he said, “I would not be here letting you berate me.”

She looked offended at that, groping up her cup and glaring at him over the rim of it as she drank.

Jon huffed a sigh himself. “In fact, I doubt he has business with Karhold and your people. I cannot imagine someone hiring a Faceless Man to avenge the loss of a chicken, four loaves of bread, and three night’s worth of milk. His business is not with Karhold. He was not here for that.”

The smile crept onto him, unbidden. “Though,” Jon said, “I wonder at the price he’d charge for such delicate difficult work.”

Alys did not have another rag to throw at him. She made as if to throw her cup and cried, “Take this seriously, damn you! If he was not here for my people, fine! But all that means is that he must be here for you. You are the king, there is no one else it can be!”

For a moment, Jon thought of the other men, three still alive and all their names unknown. But could the archer have not taken them at any time? T’was such a fine shot, that first arrow, that Jon doubted it would have been loosed at all if the man had not raised his sword.

“He _was_ here for me,” Jon said easily. The words were good in his mouth, steady and true. He turned to the window again. The archer was small and quick and clever. Sly, to take his arrow, and bold, to take the wolf. If he was watching, he would not reveal himself so easily.

The knowledge did not make Jon want to look less. It made him want to look more, that he might be the one to spot the archer, the only one to see him.

“And this,” Alys said, nearly a snarl, “does not concern you?”

“He was here for me,” Jon said again. “And that is exactly why I let him go. We are on delicate terms with the Braavosi at this moment.”

She gave him a disbelieving stare and turned to press her face to Sigorn’s chest. “I will not have it said,” she said, irate and muffled, “that you are mad for the rest of your strange ways. But this, aye. This is making me certain you have been knocked about the head a time too many!”

Sigorn pet her back and said to Jon over the crown of her head, “Not so mad, huh. He shoots some men, he hits some men, and you live. Here for you, huh? Not here to kill you.”

Alys let out a shriek into Sigorn’s neck. Jon laughed. He could not help it. His blood was up still, fast and steady. There was only a single a jagged moment when he went to touch the wooden wolf in his pocket and it was not there. It passed him in the space of a heartbeat; he knew where the wolf was.

He put his hand to Longclaw’s pommel instead.

“Davos will come in a moment,” he said. He made himself turn from the window. He wanted to keep looking even though he knew he would see nothing there. Just in case there _was_ something to see. The archer was bold. How bold? “I will tell all to you when he does. I must. You will keep thinking me mad otherwise.”

“Your beggar’s letter,” Alys said and turned her head to look at him from one damp wroth eye.

Alys was quick and clever herself. Jon thought absently that he should have sought her counsel in the matter, if the time had not been so short.

He nodded to her. “Not the letter so much,” he said. “But what they wrote back. I did not think them so determined as this, but I should have. Everything,” and it might have been his own blood he was tasting, not the phantom sense of it, “has a price.”

“Do not tell me they expect you to pay with your life,” Alys moaned and hid her face away again. Sigorn was giving Jon a concerned look; Jon shook his head. Davos was coming down the hall now, his steps clear, and Jon opened the door to let him in.

“Your Grace,” Davos said as he sketched a bow, “my lord, my lady. No news from Winterfell.”

“We need no raven,” Jon said and paced down the length of the longest wall. The room was too small. He wanted to be outside, running. He wanted to chase. “Anything they could tell us is something we already know. No, our own memories are fine enough. Shall we tell them, Davos? I do not like to do it, but if I have not left the matter behind as I thought, then Alys and Sigorn must know.” 

He thought a moment about the children digging in the kitchen garden, then about the heavy swell of Alys’ belly. “I would not be a traitor in their midst,” Jon said, “dragging trouble in under the banner of friendship.” 

Davos gave him a narrow look and helped himself to a chair. “I would not go so far as to say that, lad,” he said and sank down gratefully. “But you’re right. They need know.”

“Tell us, then!” Alys cried, muffled to Sigorn’s chest. “Tell us about this trouble, that we might come to a course of action instead of floundering about in fear of another shower of arrows!” 

“Some weeks ago I sent a beggar’s letter to Braavos,” Jon said. “You know this. You know they wrote to me in response and I found their answer so offensive that I left the Greatjon to sit the throne in my stead, that he might answer them when their envoys came.”

Alys, her face still hidden, nodded. “They offered us fine terms,” Jon said. “Four percent interest on our debt to the Iron Bank, with half the amount struck clean away at once. The terms on trade were just as generous, too, and they would extend the hand of friendship from their Sealords for ever after.”

Slowly she drew her face away and turned to stare at him. She was as astonished as the others had been; she drew Sigorn’s arms tighter about herself and said, “I can scarcely believe it.”

“You will, when you hear the price,” Davos said. He looked grim and made to rub at his short fingers, then tugged at his beard instead. With all the worrying he was doing, Jon thought, the scarred ends were bound to be sore.

“I cannot think of a single thing the North holds that is worth that,” Alys said. Sigorn, above her, shook his head.

Sigorn knew more than he let on. Jon had no doubt he was following the conversation perfectly fine. He had no doubt Sigorn had his own ideas on the matter. “They would put shackles on the North,” Jon said. He kept the growl from his voice, but his lip curled.

A direwolf was not a hound. It would not stand and let itself be penned; it was too smart to put a paw into a snare unless the snare had been very cleverly laid.

“That is what they want for such terms,” Jon said. 

“If I might, Your Grace,” Davos said and Jon returned himself to the window, sitting on the sill and letting his leg jig with energy. The urge to bite was great. He chewed the inside of his mouth as Davos sighed.

He was glad Davos would tell it. Jon did not think he could state the matter plainly without snarling.

“The price for their gifts is a wedding,” Davos said. He gave up at his beard and went to rubbing the ends of his short fingers again. “A wedding of the king to a Braavosi bride, who is even now traveling to Winterfell with the Braavosi envoy, so certain were they that they would not be refused.”

A cool quiet silence spread between them. Jon turned his face to the breeze, smelling the distant scents of the keep and the spicy sweetness under that. _You’re out there somewhere_ , he thought to the archer. _And you will try to force my hand. But no wolf will put his paw in a snare willingly, and I can see your snare from a mile off_.

“A bride,” Alys said finally, haltingly. “They cannot— Certainly there is no one left who has not heard that Jon will not wed. He turned down the Southron Queen herself, for godsakes!”

“And yet that did not make her give up the suit,” Davos said. “And her own hand is still unmatched in hopes that he will change his mind. I have no doubt that the Braavosi heard of this and decided they would try for themselves. The letter was plain. ‘She is a woman of great prestige, of a line equal to your own. She is fostered to the eldest House of Braavos and trained therein of all manners of things.’ That is what the letter said and I have no doubt that their own greed bade them send it.”

“The North is a strong country and with Spring come, it will grow only stronger still. It would be a fine coup to land a woman such as that in the king’s bed. The oldest house of Braavos, my lady, is the House of Black and White.”

Alys made a small rough noise. A denial.

“Huh,” Sigorn said. Jon looked over; he was looking back and raised his brows at Jon.

His look was enough. No wonder the archer had not struck Jon, no wonder he had filled the third swordsman full of arrows. It would be ill tidings if Jon died before he could be trapped into such a marriage.

“They would put a killer, a _spy_ in his home,” Alys said.

“Like as not they have those already,” Jon said. “We left from Winterfell to here with great haste. How could my archer have followed so quickly, if they were not in Winterfell yet?”

“They would put a killer in his bed,” Davos said. “And on the throne beside his. That is what they would do. Even if the king would not wed for other reasons, he could scarcely take this bride.”

“Another woman,” Davos said slowly, “a different woman—” 

Would that he let the matter be! Jon gave Davos a cold look that stopped up his words in his throat. He was not the only one; Alys looked at him very sourly and Sigorn was rolling his eyes.

“Aye, alright,” Davos said and showed them his palms, a quick surrender. “I am your adviser. It is advice only.”

“Poor advice,” Alys said. “And you knowing it would not be taken. Have you none to say about the assassin even now creeping among my keep?”

Jon thought he had to; Davos had a mind that was always turning. He saw things in a way other men could not. If Davos was a hound, he was a bull hound, with a jaw that would not let go of its prey without a fight. “A marriage is but one way to settle a debt,” Davos said. “We might pay them in some other manner, but I do not know what price they will ask.”

“Has the Iron Bank not sent an invoice?” Alys asked. “They are misers with their coin; they counted the Southron debt down to split coppers. Surely they’ve done the same with us.”

“Yes,” Davos said, “but the House of Black and White has not.”

It lingered between them. A debt of coins could be payed, even if you need work your fingers to the bone to pay it. But the other debt—who knew what a Faceless priest might list for you as the cost of a single death? Jon had asked Davos, who had asked many others, and the answer was clear; anything. Anything they thought would please their god, any sacrifice they felt would properly balance the cost of the life they snuffed out, quick and quiet as snuffing a candle flame.

“They lent us aid!” Alys cried. “Did they not?” She turned to Sigorn. “Did they not aid us? You said, Valyrian steel swords, dragonglass spear points and arrows, and they sent some men—”

“Four-and-ten men,” Jon said. He saw again in his mind’s eye the hooded figures. They had come by horseback, not wain or sledge, riding garrons crossed with palfreys. Their mounts had all been beautiful horses with thick hides and long legs and tiny ears, creatures out of a child’s fairy story. 

So, too, were the numbers they sent, strange figures unlike any men Jon had ever met. They had shown no surprised at the Unsullied, nor peered with awe at the dragons. The breadth and magnitude of the great armies all gathered together had not given them pause.

They had come to Jon, silently, and treated with him alone.

There had been no discussion of price and no talk of payment. Not with those queer blank people who smelled so strongly of blood and who stood still as stones as Ghost prowled among them.

Jon did not know if it was the smell of the blood, or if it was some other deep magic that drew Ghost to them, but every time that the wolf had gone missing, Jon had needed only look among the Faceless numbers to find him again, panting and prancing, following one then suddenly another, always with his tail held high and ticking.

Four-and-ten men, and they had worked deep magic in aid of the living. The cache of Valyrian steel swords, more than any man in living memory had seen in one place, had been passed to willing hands. Aye, but only after a long study of those soldiers, marked while they fought in the yard and then again against a Faceless Man themselves to prove their mettle. But the spear points—

One night the Unsullied had slept, and in the morning every spear for every hand was tipped with dragonglass. The Westerosi spearmen as well, and the free folk. And on the second night, the arrows had appeared, filling a great many a quiver, including Jon’s own.

Weirwood and dragonglass and swan feather fletching, black and white and black again. The arrow from the beach had been tipped in plain steel, but the rest was the same.

The weirwood could have been a taunt or a curse or a reminder. It could be to draw his mind to the war or it could simply be the arrows that his archer favored. There was no way to tell. 

The Faceless Men had accepted no payment. But everything had a price. The cost of even one death from those skilled hands could beggar a richer man than he. And it was not a single death that they had presented to Jon during the war. It had been a great many more than that.

“I will not pay it,” Jon said, almost to himself. Alys was still wide-eyed, Sigorn easy with the knowledge there was nothing he could do. Davos was pinch-faced and grim.

“If they want me to pay them in coin,” Jon went on, feeling the thought out, “then I will. Or land, or goods, or raw materials, the same as I offered the Iron Bank. But my hand in marriage is not a price I can pay.”

He wanted, badly, the wooden wolf back.

This was not something they could escape. Coming to Karhold had not spared Jon from it, only spread the danger to his only living kin. He could not pretend that it would be worth the fighting to make Alys’ choice for her, nor could he pretend that he _wanted_ to leave. Archer or no, the dark of the moon was coming, and Jon wanted badly to spend it among the almond trees.

“I will leave it to you, my lady,” he said at last. “It is your keep I’ve brought this trouble to, and your keep that even now a shadow is walking, and your keep where he need come to treat if he wants his god paid by my hand. If you would have us leave, we will go in the morning at first light.”

“You are not,” Alys said, “going anywhere! What if they say you must pay with your life?”

“All the better we are not in Karhold,” Jon said. He put his hand to Longclaw’s pommel. “They wish for that? Then blood will spill. I would not have it paint your walls. T’would be a poor gift from your cousin.”

She gave him a look then, cold wind and fierce pity. The Karstarks had been wolves once too, Jon thought. And the way Alys looked then, no one could mistake it.

“Thenns are brave,” Sigorn said. He put his arms around his wife and pressed his calloused palms to the swell of her belly. It did not seem to change his mind that Alys was great with child; the workings of the world did not still for one man’s wife. Jon could attest to that. He recalled, vaguely, that there had been births among the Thenns even during the deepest part of the war. “We ready, huh. They want you, then they come get you.”

“Guards, then,” Davos said. His mind was turning now to practicalites, Jon thought. “I will have them put to post outside your door and at the walls outside your chambers. And I will ask the castellan to put the shutters back on your windows.”

“No,” Jon said. “Not tonight, at least.”

In his head, he saw the angle of those arrows. Of the first arrow, so carefully aimed to aid him without giving him harm. 

Alys was clever and she knew Jon well. “You don’t think you’re in danger,” she said slowly.

“Not yet,” Jon said. “Not yet, my lady.”

He did not _feel_ like prey, sent small and cowering to hide behind his stone walls. Never mind the danger of it, standing as he had on the far end of a Faceless Man’s bow. No, prey was not what Jon felt like at all, and on his rug, Ghost rose his head up to peer at Jon and agree.

Those wise red eyes said, _It does a man good to get his blood up, Your Grace, for that is when a man is most dangerous_.

Jon was not afraid. But the archer, who had stolen his wooden wolf, need sleep with his eyes open. Jon was tired of things being taken from him. He was filled with wroth over it, banked down and burning low in his chest, his blood. The memory of wolves was long.

He would, in this, get what he wanted.

THAT night when Jon took himself abed, he did little different. He would not allow the guards at his door and went so far as to post them far at the end of the hall. He wanted no listening ears to his audience, no mouths that might repeat whatever deal he and the archer agreed upon. 

He did not undress for bed, only placed the flagon of wine and two cups on the bedside table and removed his boots before he sat himself on the covers. His back was to the headboard and Ghost came padding over to nuzzle his fingers before he laid himself down on his rug.

His door was shut and barred. But Jon left the windows open for the night air to come in, and for the archer to come in with it.

It was quiet and cool. From the world outside came the cricket song and the brush of the wind as it passed over the keep, drowsy and sweet as it stirred the window-hangings. It was no trial for Jon to sip at his wine, tasting blood in his mouth, and wait.

He did not know what he expected. He could barely make himself expect anything; he almost couldn’t think at all for the wanting. Jon wanted to have words, and he wanted to meet his archer to his face, and he wanted his wooden wolf back. All the fierceness of those desires clawing at him deep in his chest and belly. But when the archer came, it took all of his time spent as a man long under scrutiny, his time as a bastard and a lord commander and a king, not to tense in surprise when the small lithe shadow dropped to the windowsill and crouched there looking at him, head cocked just so, like a curious bird.

And then the archer spoke, as Ghost scrambled to his feet and made for the window, his tail waving like a banner caught in a furious breeze. “I did not think you to be awake,” she said in a soft husky voice. “The hour is late, Your Grace. Are you not weary?”

He had not expected this. Were they not the Faceless _Men_? Of the four-and-ten who came before, five had looked like women, though they had fought as well as their fellows, called each other _brother_ the same as their fellows did, acted as any man-soldier would during a war. Jon had thought it just another disguise, wearing a woman’s look. The fabled mask laid over their true faces to throw all those around them off the scent.

He did not get the sense, now, that this archer’s mask hid as much as that.

“Need I worry?” he asked and brought the cup to his mouth again to buy himself some time. Over the rim, he added, “That you meant to find me sleeping, I mean. Your shooting is fine, my lady. A sleeping body would be too easy a target for you.”

“I am not a lady,” was all the archer said. She offered a gloved hand to Ghost, who sniffed at it, his tail now hammering like a scout with a warning drum against the floor, and sat himself fixedly by the sill to wait for his due attentions.

She did not seem to care to look at Jon or give him _her_ attention, glancing at him but once in that moment she appeared on the sill. Now to Ghost she crooned, “Some guard you are. A fearsome slavering beast surely set to defend your master’s life.”

Ghost panted up at her, his mouth open and smiling. Those red eyes were hidden from Jon. He wondered what words the archer might take from them, ruby and blood-glitter as they were in the thin moonlight.

It galled Jon that she did not look at him and it galled him worse that Ghost was now reared up on his feet, pawing at her and panting in excited huffs. Ghost pressed his head to hers, the two of them face to face and limned in weak moonlight, as Jon’s heart beat faster in his chest with the thought that Ghost might bite. But all Ghost did was bathe her ecstatically with a shower of spittle. 

Ghost went back to all fours when the archer heaved him from her lap and turned instead to present his back to her, his face saying plain that he was unconcerned and only wanted her to scratch it. 

“He is not a slavering beast,” Jon said and set his cup aside next to the clean empty one.

“No,” she agreed and finally tilted her head to look at Jon again. “I think you have tamed him,” and her hand on Ghost’s spine sent a shower of fine white hairs to the floor. 

Jon grit his teeth. Her back was to the light. He could not see her face, just the cloud of hair around her, tangled curls that escaped her loose hood and curled like clinging vines around the edge of it. He could not tell if she was smiling as she said it—teasing him—or if it was just a faint note in her voice, a careful taunt meant to unbalance him before they began their negotiations.

He wanted very much to see her face. “Ghost,” Jon said, “to me.”

For a moment, a single bare moment, he thought the wolf wouldn’t come. He peeled himself away from the archer, pranced a scant four steps into the room, and paused to look between her and Jon. 

Those wise red eyes, when they cut to Jon, seemed to be saying, _You do not mean it, do you, Your Grace? Not for true. Look at how happy I am to see my strange friend. Let us greet each other for while longer_.

Never mind that the archer was a killer and a thief! Never mind that she had come to corral Jon into an unbearable trap! Ghost sidled back a step towards her, his tail beating like mad, and averted his eyes from Jon’s face.

The betrayal of it stung. Did Ghost not miss Nymeria? Did he not long for Arya as well, who had loved him almost as deeply as Jon did?

That he would be so happy to greet the woman, the woman that would like to see Jon and Ghost sundered from their beloveds forever—

“Ghost,” Jon snapped and those eyes turn to him again. The wolf huffed a sigh, just a gust of air from deep in his lungs, and retreated to Jon’s side.

“Come in, then,” Jon said to the archer and put his hand to Ghost’s head. He smelled, keenly, the blood in the night air now, and something under it, something distant and familiar and good. The wind must be going through the almond trees again, Jon thought.

She stood in the window and stepped to the floor. Her legs were long, lean under her thin breeches. She smelled of blood in the way the other Faceless Men had during the war, a thick dead coating of it drying on skin, but under that was also something new, the scent of a living thing, skin and sweat and salt-water.

Different, Jon thought. The archer was different than the others, taunting him and almost smiling, and smelling as she did.

“A sleeping man is a poor target,” she said to him, glancing at him then away. She sat on the sill. “I did not come to shoot you. Look at me, I carry no bow,” and she spread her arms and showed him. 

She wore a swordbelt, but it was free of a scabbard and empty of a blade, and though there might be any number of clever knives hidden under her tidy squire’s clothes, there were none in her open hands.

“Then why come?” Jon asked. His heart crashed and pounded in his chest. The light kept her a shadow. He poured wine, a slow trickle into the second cup, and offered it to her.

“I wanted to see,” she said softly. If she was not a lady, then she did a fine job pretending to be as demure as one, turning her face away from him as she did, almost shy in the motion.

But beyond that, there was nothing in her manner to tell him further: was she here to see the man she had seen before standing just behind her arrow tip, or to see the wolf enthralled with her, or even just to see the place Jon slept, that she might make some devious plan from it. 

“There’s a candle there,” Jon said and nodded at the mantel above the empty hearth. “Light it then, and look. T’would be poor manners to send you away still seeking what you came for.”

She hesitated for a long moment, keeping her eyes from him. His irritation mounted; the taste of blood welled in his mouth. Ghost was not the slavering beast. T’was Jon who felt the furious hollow ache that his quarry refused to run; t’was Jon who felt himself driven madder yet that his quarry only crouched low and hid itself in the deep brush.

He forced the thought away and did not let himself twitch or lunge as the archer stood and went to the mantel, her feet silent on the floor.

She took up the spark stone and the knife he’d left laying, and lit the candle in a single fine shower of sparks. The wick flared then settled to burning, and Jon’s heart nearly cracked in two with the sudden rush of disappointment.

 _Lovely_ , he thought to see her, a single drifting moment above the dull ache in his chest. _Lovely and lonely and lethal_. 

He did not know why the thought came upon him, so sudden and gripping that for the space of a dozen aching heartbeats, he could think of nothing else. The archer’s face was not a lovely one.

Her eyes were brown and plain, no depth or light to them to draw the eye. Her mouth was a little thin, her nose crooked like it had been broken and set wrong. Her face was dirty and round. Her cloud of hair was mousy brown and it fell only to her shoulders as she knocked her hood back and let him look.

It was a face Jon might have passed a hundred times, not once noting it as he went. He could not say if he had seen her before. There was nothing there to justify the deep sense of unease he suddenly felt, like something curled at the very edges of his vision, unseen even if he turned his head to look for it.

Mayhaps it was the late hour, or the threat of her, or the thick shadows. Jon felt like he ought to swing his head about like an unnerved horse, felt the urge to peer behind his own shoulder as if he’d catch sight of whatever lurked there. It could be caught, his own mind insisted of that hovering nagging presence, if only Jon was quick enough about it.

No, there was nothing to that face, but for the way she looked at him. Not the eyes, flat and plain, but the way she was running her gaze all over his own face like she need know it so strongly that she might never forget it. If she was a wolf or even a hound, instead of a strange little mouse, Jon might have said she looked hungry.

They looked at each other a long time, he and the archer, and Jon knew it was impossible to say what she was looking for in him, or what he had hoped to find in her face. But whatever it was, it was missing. 

He could not say if she had found her own quarry, written in his eyes and brow and cheeks and nose.

Finally the crawling silence dragged itself in a long circle about the room, coming to rest at their feet again. Before it settled there like an unwanted dog perched below a beggar’s alms bowl, Jon said, “You’ve looked. You’ve seen.” His words were quiet, but even so they seemed too loud for the cool air. He held out the wine cup again and said, “Will you drink now?”

If she had been still before, like a rabbit crouched in the brush, now she went to stone. Her face, her unlovely face, did something. It made some motion that took away all humanity in it; it raised the fine hairs on the back of Jon’s neck to see. She might have been made of wax, a funeral mask covering long-dead, softly rotting features, how entirely the blankness slid over her expression until there was nothing left.

A low whine fell through his mind, like corpse flies buzzing just behind his head. Gooseflesh covered his arms, his chest, his back. 

T’was like putting a foot down for the last stair-step and finding flat ground instead. Jon had done something, had made some misstep, some mistake, and the knowledge beat inside his head as loudly as the blows of steel swords clashing together, blade to deadly blade.

He felt as if he, too, was made of stone, as they stared at each other, as if he was a statue of himself like that which would one day rest under Winterfell’s halls. His heart hammered hard enough to hurt. Something was not right.

Something had gone wrong in that moment between addressing her and offering her the wine cup. A chill ran through his whole body. He felt that the last little chance he had—his hopes of yet slipping the snare laid for him—as it washed away like the tide carrying so much sand out from under his feet.

Ghost was also disquieted in the heavy air. Jon felt him tense, his side against Jon’s knee, and he grabbed up his ruff to restrain him just as Ghost lunged forward a step.

The failed motion stirred the archer. Her chest moved, a single silent breath, and she said in a thin voice, “You don’t know me.”

Her gloved hand drifted from her side to touch her neck, then her fingers went to linger at the soft pale flesh under her jaw, worrying at the skin just where it would be easiest for someone to sink in their teeth and bite. Touching it as if prodding at a bruise, as if every press to it hurt her.

Jon forced his eyes back to her face. He swallowed down the blood in his mouth and said, hoarse, “No. No, your face is not a familiar one.”

Those dead brown eyes did not change at all. But her hand rose to her cheek and she touched it, as hesitant as if she had forgotten the shape and the look of the face that lay there.

He had not expected this; the soft little breath she took, almost wounded, almost a whimper. If it was an act, she was a good mummer. Pity stirred and mixed with confusion under the galloping beat of his heart.

“Should I?” Jon pressed when the silence ran long, and the sensation of her eyes looking through him as they did became unbearable. “Were you sent to treat with me before this night?”

And then she was a woman again, not some dead thing dredged up out of shadows. She blinked and swallowed, and put her hand in her lap, then turned her eyes towards Ghost, where he still strained against the grip of Jon’s burnt hand. 

“No,” she said distantly, then with more spirit, “No, I think it plain that you—”

Her own voice was a rasp. Jon let go Ghost and said naught as he crossed the floor to cram his blocky head against the archer’s thigh. 

The wine cup was still full, where he had left it on the table. “Drink some,” he said and offered it again. “Your throat—”

He thought she might refuse. The Braavosi were sly and clever in ways that Jon didn’t understand; they fathomed things that Jon had never thought of. If this was an act, a mummery, Jon dared not guess to what she would do next.

He could not think of what else it would be than a mummer’s act, watching her dark glove stroke over Ghost’s head and down to the soft fur just behind his ears. She kept her eyes well away from Jon as she did it, her face turned down.

Perhaps the Braavosi had heard the story of Jon and Alys, of Jon and the Lady Jeyne, and like fools thought that his heart was soft towards weeping disappointed women.

And then she murmured, in a voice so quiet that the words seemed to rest on the breeze, on the night air itself, as lightly as chaff picked up by the wind, “I think it plain that you should not. But I’ll drink. I have travelled far. So very far,” she said as if to herself, “and I am thirsty.”

“But from your cup,” she added, and let out a sigh. “Not that one.”

There was the rub, the plot, the plan. T’was all just mummery then, some subtle maneuvering of him that Jon had almost fallen to. “It is not poisoned,” he said. “Could poison even wound you? Faceless Men, I’ve heard, number among those rare dead who might still walk.”

He would not have noticed it, how subtle her next pause was, the sudden flicker of shadow and light as she moved, but for the face. Her face was made for flinching. The small brown eyes became damp as they had not before, and she did not breathe in or out for another long span.

And then she said in a flat voice, as if none of it had happened, “All the same. Your cup, Your Grace, or not at all.”

Jon could be a gracious host. He drank from the cup he held, just to show her, but her face stayed soft and blank. So he poured wine and held out his own cup to her.

She crossed the room to take it, and she was careful not to let her gloved fingers touch his bare ones. They looked at each other again, as she stood there so close to him. The scent of her was nigh-on disappeared now, hidden under dead blood, but for a few distant tones that lingered, wafting under the scent of the almond blossoms.

She did not have a lovely face. She did not even have an interesting face. But her look gripped him. It seemed to speak in a language he could not understand. It forced him to look back, seeking. 

Jon didn’t know what he was looking for. Too see, she’d said. That was why she had come. Was it not also why he had waited alone for her, sitting calm and quiet and unafraid in the dark?

Ghost crossed the room and inserted his body between theirs, panting as he nosed first at Jon, then at the archer. Standing there, her eyes on Jon’s, the archer reached out a hand and put it to Ghost’s head. Ghost did not move, did not show his teeth or snarl, only stood loose and easy as she pet again the soft fur behind his ears. Another taunt, a proof that she was in no danger. 

The Braavosi were sly, and the archer doubly so, to enthrall his wolf the way she did, to try and stir Jon’s pity with her almost-crying. Jon’s jaw ached; he offered her a short cold nod. And then she retreated to the windowsill and put the wine to her lips.

The wind came in the window and blew past her. It smelled of the ocean. It smelled of blood. 

“You’ve seen,” Jon said again when she stayed silent. Ghost was thick with tension at his knee, quaking like the minor thrum of a finger to a bowstring, but Jon did not allow more movement from him. He gripped Ghost with his mind but for a brief moment, an ugly inarguable _No_. 

The archer set aside the cup. Her mouth was wet with wine, red as rubies, red as blood. “Did you know those men would be there?” she asked in that low sweet voice. Her eyes, in the candlelight, were like unpolished coins.

Had she? Had she come hunting them, or guarding Jon, or simply hoping to find him alone and unattended, that she might make an advance? “No more than you did,” Jon said carefully.

Her face did not change. She’d seen that her masks did not work on him and so, Jon thought, she set them aside. Never mind that he had almost fallen for it. An almost did not matter in battle; he had mastered himself in time.

Now she only nodded, slow and thoughtful. “They might have come at any other time,” she said as if to herself. “But they didn’t. They came just then.”

Her eyes stayed on him but after a moment Jon grew certain that she was not looking at him, not _seeing_ him. His hand turned to a fist where it lay on his thigh. 

“You might have closed your eyes and not seen them,” she said. “Or tripped when you rose, or been surprised by the third. I might not have come when I did,” she murmured. “Or thinking mine own camp was safe, lacked to keep my bow at hand. It was only fate that brought them to your sword point, not you to theirs.” And then, wistfully, “Sometimes the gods are good.”

“Fate,” and Jon scoffed. “Is that what brought you here?” His hand ached with holding its tension, the scarred muscle stretching, the sinew pulled tight and the feeling in his fingers dull with low pain. He set aside his own cup.

“A fine question,” she said back to him. She turned her head a little, tucking the cloud of hair behind her ear, and Jon was powerless to look away. The moonlight silvered her neck. She said softly, “I could ask you the same.”

“I asked first,” Jon said and wished he might swallow back the words. It was a green boy’s response, not a king’s and not a man’s. He could not afford to be on his back foot with the archer. She was not what he had expected. The sweet line of her bare neck was opal and agate and moonstone.

He made his eyes go elsewhere. The Braavosi were sly and clever. He need learn to expect elsewise. 

The air was thick with that scent, only hinted at from under the blanket of blood. It was in every swallow, every look. It was in how she touched her wine cup, so carefully with just the tips of her fingers, and turned her eyes from him to Ghost.

And then she put her hand to the neck of her tunic and pulled from it a piece of cloth. The dim light and the distance made it dark, colorless. She laid it on the windowsill next to her cup, and said, “I did not think you knew them. But also I do not know if they knew you. There are others left. Were you told that?”

More swordsmen. “Three,” Jon said.

She nodded, her hair falling to curtain her face, knotted tangled curls that made Jon grit his teeth. “Running from something,” she said. “Or running towards something. It must be a fearsome thing to drive them, that they would risk a wreck, sailing as they did.”

Had she watched it happen? Was it the men she was following after all? “You saw them wreck,” Jon said. He leaned forward, all his muscles tensing, but she shook her head. 

“I went looking for their boat after I saw you safely back to the keep. I wanted to see. T’was fate that spared you, or the gods, or whatever you like to call it. I only wanted to know why you needed such a thing in the first place.” 

Her breath quickened, just a little. “And now I do. It’s more of the same old ugly work, Your Grace. And now someone will die for it. Them, or even you, if they are given the chance.”

She looked at him sideways, another flat flash of those copper coins. “I will not,” she said, so mildly as to be toothless but the words still steady and true, “give them the chance.”

“Your masters want me alive, aye,” Jon agreed. His heart crashed like frothing waves to deadly rock. Saying such made him almost feel ill, that it was the great turning wheels of that old game had brought her there, but he could not let himself forget it. 

“We left so quickly from Winterfell to come here. You must be a fine rider to arrive after us in only three days without being seen. A fine spy,” he added. “To follow me so unaware and and shoot that man in time.”

Her eyes turned away, then back again. No flinch this time, but something about the dull brown color seemed to change. “I have no masters,” she said. “And I came not from Winterfell. I rode south, Your Grace, and if Braavos has a spy in your halls, it is not me.”

He swallowed down his next planned words. Despite the blood, despite those flat blank eyes, he believed her. It cracked and rang in his head. Could a wolf warg a man? Was Jon even now taking in her scent, that queerly hidden scent, and was Ghost telling him it was not the smell of a liar?

He believed her.

“So you are not here to spy,” he said. “Come you here to coax me south with you? I know what kind of snare the Braavosi are laying, but I am more clever than that. I think you will find a wolf is not an animal to come limping up and set his paw to the trap.”

She did not speak for a long moment, only sat with stillness and looked at his face. Her lips were parted a little, like she too tasted the air, the blood, in her mouth. Finally, she said, another small sigh, “I told them you would not want her.”

His hand was a fist, his jaw aching with want to bite down. “I have a bride,” Jon said. “The last of my true kin, and none can match me better.”

Her face was made for flinching. She drew back and sucked in a breath, and Jon watched as she made herself hold it in her lungs, then let it go very slowly. “I should have known,” she said, as if to herself. She turned from him to look out the window into the night, turned until he only saw her back, her shoulders sharp and stiff under her thin clothes.

The breeze came in and stole her words away. He almost did not hear it, when she asked as small as any mouse squeak, “Is she here with you?”

“No,” Jon said. There was no reason to lie. Any man might have told her, any Thenn would say it plain to her kneeler’s face if she but asked. “Last I know of her, she was far south of here. I know not when I will see her again.”

For a space of a thought, a heartbeat, he might have said there was something, some emotion, some cousin-kin to wounded about the line of her shoulders, her back. And then she was turning to face him again, a soft blank face and soft blank eyes.

But there was something to them, some small infinitesimal thing, unnameable to him even as it drove his teeth to grinding. From the corner of his eye, the sense of movement that was not truly there. It tore at him with sharp claws, that invisible restless beast, rattling inside his head and slashing at the meat clinging to his ribs.

“The hour is late,” the archer said. Her chin was lifted, not dipped and cowed, despite how soft and dull her face was. “You should take your rest, Your Grace, if I may have my leave of you.”

“Do you also sleep in the cliff caves?” he asked. And Jon could not say why he said it, a mouse needed no help from a wolf to hide, but he did. “Do not sleep there,” he told her. “Find another place. The Thenns will overtake you in the morning if you do not.”

Her face changed, a shadow-flicker. Those round cheeks came a little softer, her mouth parted further, just the smallest bit. She said softly, almost shyly, “I do not sleep so easy. I am like you.” And her eyes cut away and she said, a mumble, “At least a little bit.”

Jon wanted those eyes back on him again. There was something hidden under the blank brownness. The muscles of his hand went loose and the dull ache was gone, the motion of his fingers better for the stretching. “I sleep enough,” he said but she shook her head.

And there, her eyes again as they traced across his face with that same look, that way she had of looking at him. “What might keep a king from sleeping at night?” she asked him. 

There was some emotion to it, to her eyes and her voice. Some unknowable emotion. He felt like a horse in blinders; he felt so odd in that moment, balanced on the sharp edge of something. He could not let it be, worrying at the sensation, trying to find the right words to let from his mouth to soothe it.

In her lap, the archer’s hand touched something in the pocket of her breeches.

He had forgotten, looking at her queer eyes. But he remembered now, in a hot rush of rage. She had his wolf, the wooden wolf, and the knowledge came sudden and fierce and true. It was that which she touched her fingers to as if it were hers, as if she had any right to take comfort from it.

His hand closed again. “What could keep a killer?” he asked back, his teeth out.

Jon felt the full offense of the question the moment it spilled from his mouth. Another trespass against an ally he should have so carefully been courting. A boy’s move, a wroth boy’s move, and so foolish was he in saying it, but he couldn’t bite it back out of the air. It hung ugly between them.

He knew she would not answer him. She looked at him again, a long time, and whatever was hidden behind her eyes was buried deep now.

She would not answer and she would not leave. Everything about the archer was impossible. And he thought, or rather he didn’t think, as the word came into his mouth, that he might answer her question himself and she would disappear into cool night air, like some strange and wild creature from a child’s fairy story.

Old Nan used to tell them all of monsters and ghasts and things knocking in the night, smiling her toothless smile at how they shrieked and thrilled. Jon had never taken nightmares from it, but the others had when they were small. 

Arya, once, had been frightened in the dark. She had come and burrowed close to Jon’s side, her hot damp face to his neck, and he had put his arm around her. In that moment, Jon had been so certain that he’d keep her safe from everything. 

Now Arya was so much moonlight and shadow and snow. She crept through his dreams same as this shadowed archer crept through the night. He could not sleep enough for want of dreams; he could not trust himself to lay his head down for fear they’d undo him.

If the archer was not there, would Jon still be awake, watching the moonlight wash across the floor, feeling keenly the sense of the single howling wolf, of the empty field of flowers, of the chair beside his, of the untouched side of the bed? Might he have lingered long, dry-eyed and aching, as he thought of the night lanterns kept burning long after dark?

“Dreaming.”

It fell off his tongue, unthinking. And Jon held himself very still in the silence afterwards. They had said it in the same breath, two voices together, and the archer jerked hard, flinching back from it even as Jon made himself to stone.

Ghost lunged forward a single step towards her, slipping from under Jon’s hand, and Jon didn’t know if the blood in his own mouth was from the wolf or his own churning mind. How dare she—

How dare she take the wooden wolf, then come into his room and presume to speak so surely and intimately his own thoughts back to him—

The archer scrambled to stand on the sill, her hand once to her pocket, and Jon snarled, rising rapidly to his feet, “Do not!” as she turned to the open window.

She looked back. Her face was white now and the motion of her stirred up the breeze and put the candle out, a sudden wash of coldness between them. Smoke curled and scented the air, and her eyes were hidden from him as he said with all the command of a king, “Give it back to me. Now.”

She did not pretend not to have it. The archer was bold. She only shook her head.

“It is _mine_ ,” he said and stalked a single step closer.

He had guessed before at what emotion hid behind her eyes. Now he need not guess; he heard the teeth in her voice as she snarled back, furious, “No, it’s not!”

His blood was fire. His hands trembled with outrage, with rage. He lunged at her, his hands out to grab her and force the wolf from her pocket and place it back in his hand where it belonged, but she was quicker. She disappeared out the window like she had jumped down into the black of the night itself.

He caught his palms on the sill, panting through his teeth, and looked out. She was gone. The drop below was empty, the yard empty, the walls. There was not a single sight of her and all that remained was the scent in the air, thick and confusing as it wound through the breeze.

Blood and sweat and skin and something hidden under that, something distant and almost familiar and good. Jon’s jaw was tight with the want to bite, to sink his teeth into something soft and sweet with blood.

It was an ugly want and for a single heartbeat, he could not tell if he was a wolf or a man thinking it, both parts of him remembering the sweep of the long white neck and how delicately she had touched it, drawing his eyes there. He swallowed down the copper taste.

He did not notice for a long moment, so busy was he mastering himself, the cloth that she had left behind. It was rough under his hand, worn and frayed like it had been torn from some greater piece.

The moonlight was thin but Jon did not mind the darkness. It was enough; he saw it well enough as he picked it up and looked at it. The cloth was stiff with seasalt and reeked of unwashed bodies. It was red under the grey cast of the night. He felt the surety of it, an understanding that ran deeper than mere thinking. A light-weight red wool and the trim at one edge of it was cloth of gold cording, stiff under his fingers.

He could not bring himself to be surprised. The knowledge of it was a piece that slotted into place with a satisfying _snick_ , like setting a clean sharp sword back into its scabbard.

The wolves never had peace but for lions, not since that dread day they had come to invade the North, so long ago. That day, and it might’ve been the end of everything. 

Jon would not see it come to that again.

 _It must be a fearsome thing to drive them_. Let them be driven by whatever they chose, he thought. The name _Stark_ was not friendless anymore; Jon was not the only one with teeth. 

He did not care what brought them to the North. They had come to steal away his life, or to try and stir up war again, or ought else. It did not matter. They had forfeited their own lives setting foot on Northron land. They had forfeited their heads. 

Ghost raised his paws to the sill beside Jon and turned his muzzle to the wind, looking out, his tail drooping. Jon offered him the cloth and watched Ghost turn his face away.

“Aye,” he said. “It has the Lannister stink to it. I would not want it in my nose either. But we will get them back for it soon enough.”

But Jon’s mind whispered in small tones, _Unless_. They had only forfeited their heads unless the archer did not find them first. It made him grit his teeth, his jaw clenched tight, how casually she would take that which was his by right.

Those wise red eyes regarded the night. Then Ghost turned to look at Jon and those eyes seemed to say, _Where has she gone, my strange friend? Where is she, the mouse who is not a mouse? The thief of my sister, this archer-girl, this lion hunter who you want to bite?_

The men were not the only ones who fouled Alys’ land; killers and thieves. And there Jon was, thinking the archer lovely despite her plain face, offering her wine like she was his guest, watching the moonlight silver her neck. Nearly falling for her honorless tricks, all on the strength of that queer hidden gaze.

Jon did not want to face Ghost. He did not know what Ghost would see in Jon’s own grey eyes. He turned away, the cloth in his hand, and retreated to the bed. The wine did not wash the lingering bitter tang of blood from his tongue and his teeth. It was long since he had been disgusted with himself from the warging. The last had been before he’d woken out of Ghost’s skin and back into the shape of a man.

He wanted, badly, to bite the archer. He wanted to bite her. He wanted the chase and the blood and something with a heartbeat trapped under him, warm and soft and still for his teeth. 

He did not want to kill her.

Jon threw the cloth aside. “You are the one ensorced,” he snapped to those searching red eyes, though they had been off him now for several moments. 

“Not I,” he said. “Not I,” and even if he knew, even if there was ought but Ghost to ask him, Jon wouldn’t speak to which he tried to convince of with those words. It did not matter; neither the wolf nor the man believed them. 

“Go to sleep,” he ordered Ghost and his voice was sour. “Tomorrow we go hunting.”

But Ghost did not listen, or even turn. His eyes, his muzzle, his ears stayed forward towards the night as if his body in the window, moonstone and opal and agate and rubies as fine as blood in the moonlight, might bring that lonely lovely shadow back.

Ghost was a wolf. He did not mind that she was lethal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, guys!! After three chapters of build-up, we're finally getting somewhere interesting. Hoo, I sent that last scene to my pre-reader about four times and it was _still_ a struggle to post it. I would absolutely adore hearing what you thought <333
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's kudos'd, commented, and subscribed so far. This work came 100% prewritten but it _didn't_ come pre-edited, and your enthusiasm for this work is such amazing support to me as I try and wrangle the last half of the story into something equally as good as the first.
> 
>  **Edit:7/6--Chapter Four on 7/11, I am so sorry!! AAA!!!** Next chapter should be up 7/9, since I am still (oh god) stuck in editing hell with it, but if you want to get in contact before then or just want to chat, feel free to drop me a line here, at my email (ao3throwaway27@gmail.com) or at my tumblr, mysticalmuddle.tumblr.com!
> 
> Love you all!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Discussion of and allusion to canon-typical war crimes**

> "Now. Tell me why you spared her."  
> 
> 
> It was hard to put into words. "My father never used a headsman. He said he owed it to men he killed to look into their eyes and hear their last words. And when I looked into Ygritte's eyes, I..." Jon stared down at his hands helplessly. "I know she was an enemy, but there was no evil in her."  
> 
> 
> "No more than in the other two."  
>  —Jon VII, _A Clash of Kings_

  


> Trees suffer, like races, down the long ages.  
>  They wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages  
>  Like drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,  
>  The alien trees in alien lands: and yet  
>  The heart of blossom,  
>  The unquenchable heart of blossom!  
>  —D.H. Lawrence, _Almond Blossom_

  


### Part Four: Old Honor, and Old Justice, and...

LIKE the archer’s words had laid a curse on Jon, more Faceless magic that he could not ken, sleep didn’t come easy to him that night. He slept only in short snatches and never deeply enough to dream. He was awake already when the sky turned softly grey, and dressed and armored with the other Thenns and Karstark men before the sun was up for more than a quarter hour.

They all broke their fast in hurried snatches, loathe to waste daylight, picking food up from the tables in the hall and taking it to the stable yard, bread and meat held between their teeth as they saddled their horses and checked each other’s armor. 

The pair nearest Jon were very enthusiastic about those duties in particular. They were a Thenn and a Karstark, and neither of them could be more than four-and-ten. The Karstark lad, when he was finished checking his friend’s shoulder straps, paused a moment, considering, then yanked the buckles so tightly that the Thenn boy yelped and jerked.

He was good-humored about it, both of them dissolving into laughter almost immediately, and it made Jon look away. They were so green that the danger of the day, the thought that they might lose their brother, had not even crossed their minds.

He missed Robb in that moment, fiercely.

Davos, sleep-sand still in his eyes, was nearly the last to come out. He looked like he had slept no better than Jon. He looked like he had slept a great deal worse in fact. His own horse was waiting, a stable boy sitting at the fence and kicking his heels to the post as he held the reins, but Davos ignored it and came straight to Jon.

“You’re alive,” he said, stopping a step or two away. He didn’t go so far as to pat across Jon’s chest and ensure it, only heaved an enormous sigh that smelled strongly of chicory.

“Aye,” Jon agreed. Behind Davos’ shoulder, the Thenn boy was returning the favor, yanking at the Karstark boy’s straps and buckles until the poor lad was dragged back a step and yowling. “As are you, my lord. Perhaps you better see that I was right?”

“I better see that you’re a nuisance,” Davos grumbled. He turned to look over his shoulder, giving a grim eye to the laughing pair, and said, “You’d think they’d take their king’s security better than that.”

“They’re young,” Jon said, and his heart ached with it. “Let them be. If you’re so nervous for me, come and check my armor. Though, less enthusiastically, if you please.”

Davos gave him a grim look as well, but set himself to the task. Standing closer, where they might speak without fear of being overheard, he said, “What did your visitor have to say on the matter? Did he know aught about the men?”

 _She_ had been soft and strange and wroth. _I will not give them the chance_ , she had told Jon. “I had no visitor,” Jon lied easily. His hand, as Davos fussed over the buckles of his greaves, wanted to go to his pocket, where the red scrap of cloth rested.

Sigorn had ideas to send scouts down the shore. Jon need not mention the archer and the wrecked ship; they would find it for true eventually.

Davos huffed and tugged at Jon’s breastplate. “I didn’t,” Jon said again coolly, “and the archer has my thanks for it. I needed the sleep more than I needed to add trouble to my plate.”

“Aye,” Davos agreed grudgingly. “We’ve enough trouble with these other men. But it is a worry, Your Grace, that we have no idea why there is a Faceless Man here.”

“I’m sure we’ll know in time,” Jon said. “But rest assured, I still doubt he’s come to lay a price on my head. Let us deal first with those men who might still want that honor.”

Davos’ hand now was at Jon’s shoulder. “This rivet is coming loose,” he said, tugging gently at the strap to seat it better in the buckle. “Mayhaps you ought to—”

“I won’t stay behind until it’s seen to,” Jon said patiently. Davos huffed again, and Jon added, “Is it not better to stay with the guards? And if I do that, I might hear what these men have come for as soon as we find them.”

Alys and Sigorn were leaving the hall now, Sigorn’s arm careful about her waist as he helped Alys down the steps. “I’ll certainly rest easier,” Davos grumbled, “when we know whether there’s a plot to take your head, or some other business afoot.”

“I doubt you’ll be the only one,” Jon agreed. Sigorn stopped a moment to speak to the groom holding his own horse, and Alys was quick to grow impatient with him. She untangled her arm from his, lifted her skirts a little to better move, and marched across the yard straight towards Jon.

“You’re alive!” she said as she came closer and Jon had to put a hand to his mouth to muffle the laughter as a cough.

“Just as you see,” he told her when he’d composed himself. “You are not the only one surprised by it. Davos, too, seems almost offended that I had the temerity _not_ to be slain in my sleep.”

“It is awkward,” Alys cried, “as I wasted half my night working at death clothes for you. But look cheerful, Lord Hand! He might yet catch an arrow, or else a lucky sword strike, since he will not be sensible and stay here with me!”

Her look to Jon, as she said the words, was full of narrowed irritation. Jon need not look over his shoulder at Davos to know that he received the same look from both sides. But a king could not be commanded, only advised, and Jon wouldn’t listen to advice that kept him penned inside Karhold’s sturdy walls when there was a threat lurking about outside of them.

Nor, he thought, when the archer went free outside those walls as well. 

“I’ll have neither, my lady,” Jon said and caught up her balled hand before she could thump it to his shoulder. “Truly,” he said, drawing Alys a little closer so they could speak without being overheard. “There is no threat I don’t trust your men to shield me from, and as for the other matter—”

He wanted badly to reassure her. Her eyes were glossy, teary despite her irritation, and the hand in his, though it didn’t shake or tremble, unfolded to squeeze tightly back at his fingers. She was concerned, and Jon didn’t much like the thought of leaving her so worried.

But the archer was his. She was _his_ quarry. 

“Mayhaps you might look over my saddle as well, since you are both determined to act as my nursemaids,” Jon said to Davos, who snorted like a horse. But he didn’t argue, only furrowed his brows at Jon, turned on his heel, and marched off. Jon waited until he was gone, far across the yard, before he turned to Alys again.

Her lips were pressed together, white with the force of it. “Trust in me,” Jon told her, “that I would do nothing to endanger myself in this. I am not uncareful, cousin. You know as well as I do, that I cannot risk my life.”

Alys sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out slowly and nodded. “Fine,” she said, some of her high spirits coming back. “But only since you seem so sure! And be careful.”

Her hand now went to her belly, stroking over the heavy swell of it as she narrowed her eyes at Jon. “With this other matter, and with the fighting,” she ordered him. But Jon’s words to Ghost the night before hadn’t been a lie.

“What hunting party sets out to cross swords? For that’s what we are, a hunting party,” Jon said. “And a sizable one, three dozen against three. When our prey is found, what fight would there be in that?”

“We can’t know what they want,” Alys said. Her frown hadn’t left her. She leaned in and whispered, below the jingle of the many sets of tack, and the distant voices of the other men, “Not them, or that man, the archer.” She was japing no longer as she pressed, “You are sure you will not stay here with me? You are certain—”

He had lied so thoroughly about it that morning that another lie didn’t bother him at all. “Yester-morning satisfied me in this regard,” Jon murmured just as quietly. “He is not here for my life. And I have had no sign from him since, though not for lack of trying. Can you not tell, my lady? I did not sleep the whole night through, that I might be awake when he came in.”

“You look as if you didn’t,” Alys said back. Her eyes were very blue in the early light, as she fastened them upon Jon’s. Whatever she saw in his face must have reassured her enough at last. She said, “Fine, go then. And I will only spend my whole day worrying about how I might replace the king with no one to notice—”

“You worry too much,” Sigorn chided, coming back towards them. He turned her gently with his hands at her shoulders and kissed her a thorough goodbye. “We go, huh?” he said when he pulled away. “We come back. You stay here, _inside_.”

She gave him a sour look, but let the Thenn waiting to play as her guard, a spearwife dressed in leathers, take her arm to lead her back to her bower. The men were mounting now, and Davos approaching with his horse and Jon’s.

“The things I do for you!” Alys called over her shoulder to Sigorn as she went. Her face was pale against her loose dark hair, her steps slow. Her guardswoman led her carefully between the horses until Alys looked forward again.

To Jon, Sigorn said only, “Women,” with a shake of his head. His voice was a little sour, as if he thought the whole world was filled only with ladies who could not do what they were told, not even to ease their lord husbands’ minds. 

It made Jon laugh, the way he said it, irritated yet still so full of fondness. They were a good match, the Magnar of Thenn and Alys Karstark.

If Sigorn ever bothered to go south of the Neck, he might chance to meet some of the weeping willowy things that filled the keeps and towers there. He’d well learn then just how lucky he was in Alys, who was grown from a sturdy Northron stock. Jon was certain if Alys wasn’t slow and tired with her pregnancy, she would be climbing down the cliffs with them, outraged still at the men who had eaten her bread and tried to kill her guest.

After the Freys, after Robb had been slaughtered alongside half the young noble blood above the Neck, the North took guest rights especially serious. The thought of it made Jon somber, as it did every time it struck him. The Thenn boy and the Karstark boy rode beside each other, faces turned to each other, speaking in laughing tones the pidgin language that bridged the Old Tongue and the Common Tongue.

They were so young and green, those two lads. They didn’t fear the thought of losing their brothers. Jon’s mirth died. _You gods_ , he prayed, head bowed as he mounted his horse, _let them never know it. Let us be the last who paid that price._

It turned into the only bright spot of the day, that single early laugh he’d had with Sigorn. Everything in the world came with a price; the gods had given Jon three almost peaceful days, and now he was to repay them in a single harsh day made for teeth gritting.

Sigorn picked six of his Thenns to ride southward down the coast, watching for a wrecked vessel, as he and Jon agreed must have brought the men. Their clothes had been thick with seasalt, those three that Jon had slain. And plainly it need be a boat that brought them. Lions would not survive passing through the Neck.

The two green boys went with the party headed south, and Jon was glad of it. It made his chest ache to see them with each other, so bright and happy. He did not grudge it of them, and he felt almost ashamed of the unworthy thought, the distant grief that Jon’s own brother was gone yet they still had theirs. He didn’t grudge it of them, but he was glad when they were gone.

The rest of them looked to the orchard road. Davos, in the trees, was a-twitch with nervousness. “Pardons, Your Grace,” he said when he guided his horse a little too close to Jon’s own and both made to startle. Jon soothed his horse, speaking softly to its swiveling ears and petting its neck until it eased, all the while gritting his teeth.

He didn’t need Davos looking so thoroughly for the archer. Jon didn’t want even the smallest chance of Davos seeing her.

Their riding party made further desecration of the orchard than the slaughter the day before, the air stirred and loud with so many men and all their mounted steps grinding the fallen blossoms into mush on the ground. The air smelled of horse and metal and oil. There was no quiet to be found there, no wonder for the trees. Jon grit his teeth.

They paused just beyond the almond trees, where the rows changed to pear saplings and the outbuildings began. They’d been searched the night before, and those that could be locked had been shut up, but Sigorn paused a moment, and Jon stilled his own horse where he rode at Sigorn’s side.

“Better check again,” Sigorn said after a moment, his mouth a sharp downward curve. He issued orders to some of the men and they peeled away from the party towards the haybarns, dotting the distant fields, and the summer dairy that backed against the cow pastures. 

The only building he didn’t send men to search was the nearest, where the heavy oak doors were open and a group of men were spilling out, coughing and trying to wave away the thick black clouds of smoke that followed them.

“Better not,” Sigorn said when Jon pointed at it and raised his brow. “They look busy, huh?” His grin, just the curled corner of his mouth that showed a white shard of tooth, was amused at something, but he turned away instead of sharing the joke.

It wasn’t until that moment, when their party waited for the others to come back instead of riding on, that Jon realized that Sigorn had been rattled, too. He put his horse between Jon’s and the outbuildings, speaking cheerfully to his men, but his sharp eyes went to the distance then back to Jon two or three times.

The care chafed at Jon, but t’was not his land and his men. He stayed a-horse, breathing in the scent of the almond blossoms and the sea, watching the edge of distant cliff for movement.

All of them startled when the distant frantic shouts came, Davos, in particular, making as if to fall off his horse, his hand out to drag Jon down with him. The other men put hands on their sword pommels or reached towards their spears, as the party at the nearest haybarn scattered out from under the cover of it, crows winging after them and screeching down at them, small shadows against the blue sky.

The flock spiraled to the sky then dipped to wing towards them, the rusty shouts of their cries echoing down to mix with the relieved laughter breaking out around Jon. He ignored the others, lifting his head to watch the flight, and felt all the hairs on the back of his neck rise to attention.

He was not wary of Lannister men. He didn’t look for them. But this, the sudden and furious sensation of being watched—

The distant edge of the cliff was too far to see if a figure stood there, or hid among the farthest row of trees. The sensation got stronger, as the crows settled in the empty pear trees to jeer down at them.

She might be anywhere. Cool sweat gathered at his temples, the small of his back. Jon’s horse moved uneasily underneath him and he gave it an apology, a pat to the neck as he forced his hands to be easier with reins. She could be anywhere.

He grit his teeth.

“Easy, lad,” Davos said. He rode a little closer and reached out to touch Jon’s hand. “Easy, just some birds.”

She could be in the dairy, standing with the milkmaids in the doorway, or hidden among the coughing, smoking men, or tucked away among the trees, where the clouds of blossoms hid her.

“Aye,” Jon rasped, his whole body alight with the knowledge of eyes on him. He loosed the fist he’d made of his burnt hand, and touched it to his pocket, briefly, checking the cloth the archer had left behind.

Sigorn gave him an odd look, and Jon forced his face back to mildness. “Nothing,” he said to those sharp eyes.

They rode on, leaving the road to move closer to the cliffs. “First cave not too far,” Sigorn said as the orchards fell away. “Two miles, three.”

“They were being careful,” Jon said. He thought of the archer’s words, as the sense of eyes on him faded away. “Might be it was chance after all,” he said to himself, and shook his head to Sigorn when he looked over at Jon.

In his pocket, where the wolf had rested, was the scrap of red and gold cloth. It was a struggle to keep himself from constantly tucking his fingers inside and touching it; he could not feel the weight of it through the fabric of his breeches and he badly did not want it to fall out.

Proof that she had been there, proof that he would _find_ her, proof that Jon had kept greedily to himself.

It made no difference that Jon had hidden their meeting. She had come to Jon to see; it was on Jon’s face that she had fed her hungry eyes; it was Jon’s window that she had slipped into the night before; his wine that she had drank. She was not here for Karhold and its people.

It made no bearing that Jon had kept it for himself. The Thenn scouts would find the wrecked boat the same as the archer had. And it mattered not _where_ the men had come from, save that it was not from the North. 

No, it did not matter that Jon kept the archer for himself. He couldn’t make himself feel any guilt at it, as they left the horses with the squire that had ridden out with them and made to brave the path downwards.

Jon was tucked into the middle of the party, more nursemaiding on Davos’ part, and he kept his eyes wide as he descended, but had little hope of seeing anything useful before a Thenn’s quick eye saw it first.

Not of the Lannister men, at least. But the archer had come to Jon to see, and might make a sign just for him.

Everywhere they went that morning, down the ragged edge of the shore, he kept his eyes open for a small sign of her, a footprint or some other mark. Some sign that she had passed through the same area and now t’was Jon stalking at her trail.

He could not find one. He grit at his teeth.

She had to walk the same spaces. He soothed himself with that, that she need come here as well. T’was the only place she might go to pick up the scent. She would be there, or else she _had_ been there. 

Jon could not discount that she had come first, long before him, despite the lack of sign. She was like him a little; if she had slept as ill as he had the night before, then she might have beat him to the mark. But some small keen sense made him feel odd, as if he was a fool to look for a secret mark from her, to be noticed by his eyes alone.

He thought, once or twice, as he helped some Thenns cut away the brush and thicket hiding the cave mouths they need search, that he could feel her watching him again, as if she trailed behind their party. The hair at the back of his neck would not lay down and he turned his eyes, when they were not peering around for Lannisters, to the tops of the cliffs as if he might spy her hiding there. 

The Braavosi were a sly and clever people, the archer especially so. When Jon looked, he had no more joy of it than he had in the orchards. There was nothing to see but brush and low scrub trees and other piles of broken Northron stone. It grated against him like armor buckled too tight. He grit his teeth.

Ghost, as well, could not focus. He ranged far from Jon and though he came when called, t’was but sulkily. He would not track. He balked at entering the cave Sigorn had found the day before, turned his silent eyes to Jon’s face, and lay down where he stood instead of following them in. 

You could not drag a direwolf.

Now Ghost ran up and down the sand, pouncing at the skittering crabs trying to flee him, biting at the waves as they came in, and barking silently at the water as it retreated, as happy as any pup just off the teat.

Once before, Ghost had been as merry and playful as this, as he tumbled around Winterfell with five other wolf pups. They had made a fine pack, though t’was Nymeria who he wrestled with and nipped at and chased the most.

It had made Arya laugh to see how much Ghost liked his sister, same as Jon liked her. And how could Ghost not? Jon could not fathom it, knowing now what he did of wolves and wargs. Arya was so easy to love, so of course Nymeria would be the same.

But Ghost now was alone and packless, a wolf grown and not a pup any longer. The salt-spray splashed over his face and he chased the fleeing waves, kicking up water in bouncing leaps just to bite at the silver arcs of it.

Ensorced, Jon thought grimly. He grit his teeth. The rage of it kept him awake as they moved down the coast in small parties. She had no right to turn whatever strange magic she’d used onto his wolf. Was nothing sacred? Could Jon not have a single thing left to himself, untouched by those thin gloved hands?

She had taken even the dreaming.

On the far side of noon, the sun beating down fiercely for the season, the men began to flag, kicking at rocks and shading their eyes and wiped their faces free of sandy sweat. Sigorn offered Jon a waterskin and they stood together in the thinnest scrap of shade the cliffs offered. 

“How much have we searched?” Jon asked as he passed the water over.

“Not enough,” Sigorn said back, and tilted his head to shake out the last drops of water to his tongue. 

Even Davos, in his grim-faced determination, was looking worn. Most of a day gone, searching, and they had found nothing. Jon grit his teeth. 

They were readying themselves to start again, and Jon was reaching for the Thennish blade he’d been loaned, so as not to dull Longclaw on the brush, when a far whistle sounded. High above on the cliff head was a man a-horse a fine roan. His bronze sword cut the sunlight into bright beams as he saluted them.

“Found it,” Sigorn said and spat. And then, irritated, “Fucking ships. No port, huh?” To Davos, who snorted. “They make me a fucking port.”

“We stop here,” Sigorn said, raising his brows at Jon, a question.

T’was the only lead they had. “Aye,” Jon agreed, and sank down on the nearest rock. 

They broke to eat; Alys and her women had furnished them with bread and hard cheese and dried meat, good fare for fighting and traveling, a diet as familiar as the dark and cold of the Winter just past. The rider left his horse above with the boy who’d come along to watch the other mounts, and climbed down the footpath to join them, sure-footed as any goat. 

The scout and Sigorn conferred for long moments in the Old Tongue, and something passed from hand to hand. Sigorn’s face was washed with sunlight and sweat and disgust as he came and threw himself to the ground next to Jon. Sand skittered through the air and Jon shook a scatter of grains from his piece of bread.

“You my guest,” Sigorn said, giving Jon a long look, though Jon could not say exactly to what thoughts Sigorn’s hard eyes spoke to.

“Aye,” Jon agreed. He offered Sigorn a piece of the dried meat, not caring to brush the sand off of it himself, and Sigorn took it but only held it in his hand.

“Maybe I give you gift,” he said musingly to Jon. “Nice guest gift, huh? Fit for king. Three nice pelts,” and he threw between them a scrap of cloth, woven red wool and cloth of gold cording, much dirtier than the piece that the archer had brought to Jon. 

“Lannisters,” Davos said with some surprise. He paused with a piece of cheese half-way to his mouth and looked around as if they would suddenly appear.

“Lions,” Sigorn grumbled and spat again. “Four miles,” he said and pointed south of them. “Ship smashed to shit on sand, big fucking hole in side.” 

“I’ve seen the coastline here,” Davos said. “The cliffs don’t reach out very far, and this side of the Shivering Sea is not the place to find sandbars. And the rocks here, any sailor would know to avoid them! What did they wreck _on_?”

Sigorn sucked his teeth, then shrugged. “Beach?” he said. “Sand?”

The Thenns, living inland as they did before they came to Karhold, bore few sailors. No doubt Davos, Jon thought, would insist on turning south to examine the ship himself. 

“You’re certain they’re Lannisters,” Davos pressed. He reached for the filthy cloth and held it to the light to better see it.

“My man say lions,” Sigorn said. He gestured with the bit of meat he held, an aggressive point at Jon. “Lions hate king. Lions come and kill king, fight bad, so we kill the lions.”

His face said, plainly, _That is the end of the matter_.

“Aye,” Davos said, not agreeing, “but the Lannisters know how to sail! What kind of ship was this? How many men would be needed to crew it? I cannot think of a single reason they’d run themselves ashore in such a way.”

Sigorn looked even less impressed. Jon had a vague idea that Sigorn himself became violently seasick, but it might’ve been another of the Thenns and he himself was misremembering. “Ship,” Sigorn said and shrugged, indifferent.

“The Lannisters are not the only ones to cloak their men in red and yellow,” Davos pressed. “Several Dornish houses also favor red and gold among their heraldry and sigils, and more than a few in the Reach!”

“And who would send their men dressed so, if they were going to attempt an assassination?” Jon asked mildly, to stop their arguing. Ghost was plaguing a flock of shorebirds now, crouching low to ease them into settling back to the sand, then once they did, exploding from his place to scatter them again. “Look again at that, Lord Hand. See how filthy it is, how worn? And a lighter wool. If it was spun for this Spring, it would not be half so aged. No, that is an old cloth and last there was an army in red and gold, dressed for warmer weather, t’was a lion’s army.”

Davos could not argue with that. He huffed, and said, “Perhaps.”

Sigorn was cheered to be supported. “Lions, huh?” he said. “I _said_ so.”

“Aye, alright, you did,” Davos grumbled back. “There’s no need to try and rub my nose in it when all I’m trying to do is—”

Jon found he had nothing more to say on the matter. He schooled his face back to mildness, that they could not claim he was taking either side in their argument, and squinted up at the cliffs again. The fine hairs on the back of his neck were standing upright. He whistled Ghost to him, gave him a grudging piece of cheese, and said, “Away, Ghost.”

If he had hopes of seeing Ghost take a footpath up and throw himself before the archer to have his belly scratched, they were fast to wither and die. Ghost snapped up the cheese and those red eyes turned to Jon as if to say, _You’ll have nothing from me, Your Grace. It does a man good to get his blood up. Does him good to go hunting once in a while._

The rider had gone among the other Thenns to have his own supper and he had not kept his mouth shut. The farthest group of Thenns, the one the rider had joined, stood and split to join other groups, something careful about their movements. They joined, Jon noted, gatherings of Karstarks.

Jon put a piece of bread in his mouth to give his teeth something to do other than grind against each other. 

There was a bird perched on a rock barely three arms’ lengths away, a queer looking thing with a pale white body, soft grey back, and a dark swoop of inky feathers across its head, hiding its bright black eyes. T’was kin of the ones Ghost had been harassing. It seemed unbothered by the invading men. It cocked its head at Jon and he tossed it a crumb of dried meat.

It had a sharp beak, a wicked blade, that bird. Like Ghost, t’was clearly a predator. It made a noise at Jon, watching the bit of jerky arc through the air towards it.

 _Reparations_ , Jon might have told it, _for letting my wolf run so wild_. But he was keenly aware that Davos sat so close and would find it odd to see Jon speaking to the bird. He kept the words in his mouth.

Davos gave an irritated grunt at Sigorn and set aside the cloth, looking at it for a long moment as it lay crumpled in the sand. He said grudgingly, “Likely you’re right and I should have known. There is no other family in this realm that cannot seem to leave things be.”

The bird was still perched close. It considered the jerky and hopped closer to it, its neck leaned out long as it looked. It was a fierce, curious little thing. Its kin lingered in the distance, avoiding Ghost and chattering to each other, too afraid to come closer.

“Lions,” Sigorn said again. He finally put the dried meat in his mouth, made a face at the crunch of the sand, then gave Jon’s arm an aggressive poke. “You said no more, huh? Said dragon queen locked them all up.”

Daenerys had, most of those captured men who’d survived the war and been marched back south again. 

The letters flying north assured Jon that the trials were progressing well and consensus was achieved by the queen’s jury on most of the cases. Jon might not have believed Daenerys’ claim on his own, but Lady Brienne’s letters, in keeping her oath to Catelyn Stark and her war-time oath to Jon’s house, read just the same as those scrolls under the official heading of the queen.

The Kingslayer’s army had missed the cull, by coming North willingly and bending the knee. It helped, too, that the worst of the Lannister men had stayed to fight for their whore queen. 

But the ones Daenerys had taken, those men were released back to their homes on parole with strict outlines on their duties now to their lands and their people as penitence for their crimes, or else put to their deaths.

The bird would have to hurry if it wanted to keep its supper. Another of its kind was swooping down, giving a squeaking shrieking cry, and Jon’s bird spread its long wings wide and shrieked back furiously.

They were fierce little things. Give them scales for feathers, and little gouts of flame to add to the shrieking, turn the powdery sand to snow, and they might have been Daenerys’ dragons, fighting over the new slaughtered goats.

It struck Jon suddenly and violently, the deep understanding that came a scant second after the first thought. _It must be a fearsome thing to drive them_. 

It was. It was.

Had Jon not said it to Alys? Had they not spoken on the ugly power of it?

It made the soft Westermen cower in their keeps; it made the Dornish in their old proud palaces, the very blood of the Rhoynish Witch-Queen Nymeria, consent to bend their necks enough to bargain; it brought low those eagles of the Eyrie who stood untouchable above the rest.

It made those old icy Kings of Winter twin their hands in wedded alliance under the heavy cloak of black wing and high distant shadow.

What could drive a man into danger of drowning, into violence, into cowardice? What could drive a man into madness as nothing could before or since? 

What could send lions fleeing to a wolf-ruled shore?

Dragonfire could. 

His heart hammered in his chest so loudly that for a moment, t’was all that he could hear. His breaths sped a little, until he had to swallow back down jagged pants.

“The trials,” he rasped and he almost had no voice, so deep was the sudden welling of his fury. It gathered in his throat, like he might vomit up the rage itself, ash and glassy stone and smoke flecked with the soft white scraps of burnt flesh that drifted through the air with every burning blow of flames.

He’d had rages before, but none like this, that seemed to remove him from his body. Jon could not speak to what his face did, as he dug his hand into his pocket and grasped the cloth. It was rough, stiff to his fingers. The world seemed almost to blur. 

“Your Grace?”

His heart was louder in his ears than a thousand drums, than the shriek of the winds as they crashed into the Wall, than the keening crystalline cries of the Others as they fought. And below it all, a thought that coiled dark and dangerous in his mind. Jon had not brought this danger to his people.

The last of his kin; the last of his kind, and he might have lost them both in one fell swoop. Alys walked the orchard often. Alys did not keep a guard with her. Alys was fierce as a she-wolf, but she was also heavy with babe and slow in moving. She might have died, or Sigorn, or their people—

He couldn’t bear to think that it was his presence there; he’d forced the thought from his mind. But now he knew. Jon hadn’t dragged this down among them. It was Daenerys who had endangered Alys and Sigorn in such a way.

The fine hairs at the back of his neck raised, slowly, until they stood at quivering ends. The cut on his arm throbbed with every crash of his heart.

“Snow. Hey, Snow.”

He wasn’t alone, not even when Jon wished for it. The archer was near. The knowledge of it burrowed into his bones. The archer was there and she was watching. Did she know already why the men had come? Had she guessed? Had she always known, from the moment she found the boat?

If she had, her pretending at ignorance was meant to shelter the queen. But even as he thought it, even as the rage came over him in slow steady waves, he could not bring himself to believe it. 

“Your Grace—”

 _The same old ugly work_ , the archer had said. _I will not give them the chance_ , her soft voice whispered in Jon’s memory. 

Either she did not know, or hadn’t said. If this was a test, some strange Braavosi way the archer had of spurring him to reaction, another way to pluck at some invisible strings above him like he was a mummer’s puppet, Jon would not give her the satisfaction.

She hadn’t come to spy at him, or to coax him, or to forward her masters’ works. She had no masters; she had come alone. But she had come to _see_ , just when Daenerys had lost six of her prisoners to Jon’s shore. 

She had come to see, and the world well knew that the Braavosi people, those bastard daughters of Old Valyrian slaves, did not like dragons.

Mayhaps even now she was staring at him down the shaft of her arrow, waiting. Watching. The thought that she might be soothed him, eased the furious clamor of his heart.

Jon was not a dragon; Jon was a wolf. And wolves did not explode into noise and flame, to be so threatened. They stalked and waited and killed, swiftly and quickly, the invaders to their territory, the threats to their packs and dens.

“Jon. Lad.”

Jon was not a dragon, and he wouldn’t let the archer see him as such. He took a measured breath, then let it out slow. She could find no censure in his response, no sign of that fiery madness his seed-father’s family was known for.

The thought cooled him. His veins filled with ice, snowmelt. He ran his fingers slowly over the cording until his hand quit trembling, forcing himself back under control. 

Motion, black and white and grey across the pale sand. But t’was not an arrow, only the shorebird. It was alone again, having driven off its foe. It had fastened those shining eyes to Jon, its soft head cocked to the side, as if hoping for another piece of his food.

Its eyes were wetly black, and gleaming in the afternoon light. It made a little noise, fluffing its wings and coming the smallest step closer.

 _I have nothing for you_ , Jon might’ve said if he was alone. _Look elsewhere, if you’re wanting something. There is nothing more that I can give._

“Lad?” Davos asked slowly and Jon looked up. They were both looking at him, Davos grimly and Sigorn with concern. Jon withdrew his hand from his pocket.

Jon said louder this time, more confident in his response, “The trials. That is why the men have come. It has naught to do with us, but for the fact that they wrecked ashore here.”

They were quick to understand. Sigorn still thought it the sword, but Davos knew the matter true. He’d counseled Jon on keeping it quiet from the other lords. Davos said darkly, “They’re running, then. Trying to escape it.”

“Aye,” Jon said. “Aye, it’s not our mess we’re mopping up this time.”

Sigorn ate another piece of meat, slowly. His eyes were far; when he was done thinking, he swallowed and said, “Where they fucking going, huh? Skagos? Better die there than here?”

“Better anywhere than in King’s Landing,” Jon said. Fire was for the dead, he thought, not the living. Alys had felt the horror, though she didn’t all the way understand it.

But Jon couldn’t tell Sigorn the truth. He’d fought in the War for the Dawn. Jon was certain he himself wasn’t the only one who still had nightmares of those dark terrible years, or saw those deep red gouts of flame when he shut his eyes.

His hand, in his lap, trembled, but Jon made himself master it, curling those burnt fingers to a tight fist. All the work he had taken, all the care to keep the news to himself, and he felt it being undone in the space of a single day.

T’was maddening, that he felt those threads loosen and fray. But he couldn’t bring himself to try and mend them.

They three sat in silence a moment. The sensation of being watched did not lessen. Jon wanted to offer the archer a grim smile; he wanted her to see how well he had mastered himself, that he had not stepped into her trap. She could watch him all she wanted, he thought, but Jon, too, had eyes. He, too, was quick and clever. 

She could look all she liked, down the arrow placed to her bowstring, or from her perch on his windowsill; he was looking back.

Finally Davos sighed and shared a grim look with Jon. He said, “It’s ugly work, then. Having to round these men up and send them back where they came from. But I’ll admit to some gladness that they’re not here to try and collect your head, lad.”

“Might be our Braavosi friend is not even here for you after all,” Davos went on, this time with greater cheer. “Losing prisoners would be a great embarrassment to Her Grace. Perhaps he came to ensure no one knew about her mistake.”

Jon’s mouth was open to deny it before he even thought. The archer was his; his quarry. It was only luck he remembered in time to keep from blurting it out. He snapped his mouth shut, then chewed at his tongue and muttered, “Mayhaps.”

It sounded sullen, sulky, even to his ears. The bird hopped back a step and let out another of those cries, louder and cackling. Jon glared at it and chucked his last piece of bread towards its queerly colored head and it jerked back, offended, and winged off.

The feeling of being watched was gone now. Jon glared down at his lap. T’was a lord’s duty to send shipwreckers back the way they came but he did not want to clean up Daenerys’ mess for her, not when it had endangered Jon’s own people and so badly.

He did not think he minded so much now, if the archer found the men before Jon did. He didn’t want to lose his hunt to her, Jon was _certain_ he was the better hunter and he ached to prove it, but at least if she found them, it would be over with.

Sigorn and Davos turned back to their suppers, but Jon wasn’t hungry anymore. He looked down the shore, watching Ghost throw himself to the damp sand and roll until he was crusted in it.

The trouble with the Thenns wasn’t over. That first group that had scattered rose from their seats and moved again, leaving murmuring and long looks behind them. It was barely a minute’s more time before the first Karstark man approached and demanded of them, “We looking for Lannisters, Your Grace?”

The cloth was still sitting there. Jon picked it up, shook the worst of the sand off of it, and tossed it over. “How many other houses hate Starks and bear the colors red and gold?” he asked Davos conversationally.

He had his mouth full and gave Jon a look of supreme irritation. It was a small mean thought, not the charitable thought a king was supposed to have, but Jon was just a man. He was sullen at the idea that the archer had naught to do with him; he was glad that he was not the only one having a poor day.

The Karstark man was done looking the cloth over. His mouth twisted in disgust and his sword hand went to the pommel of the sword at his waist, as if he greatly wanted a Lannister before him, to swing his sword against. “Fucking well stinks of them,” he said. “I never met an animal stinks worse than a lion.”

“Well said,” Jon told him. Ghost was digging at the sand now, wet clumps of it flying all around him, and the men sitting three feet away of him got up and moved, trying to keep the storm out of their food rather than argue or try to shout him away.

“Some of the men has been talking,” the Karstark said, “Your Grace, my lord.” He checked his hold on his sword, and thumped his fist to his chest, a rough salute. “Some Stark men.”

And no doubt they had been urged on by the Thenns. Jon trusted Davos, in picking Jon’s retinue, to choose men who could get along with Thenn and Karstark alike. All of them had wanted to join the hunt, half to guard Jon himself from the possible threat and half because their friends among the household guards were going. 

Jon hadn’t anticipated a problem, but then, he hadn’t anticipated the Lannisters to be escaped prisoners either. He grit his teeth and gave the man his full attention, raising his brows.

“They was saying, don’t the king have a duty to send shipwreckers back the way they came?”

“It depends on why they would come to this land,” Jon said. The last of the fraying threads, his hopes to hide it, were slipping away. He made a final grab at them. “A man is on his way to trade at some port, who washed to my shores or had his ship run afoul? Then aye, I’d send him back to his home.”

“Somehow I don’t think these lions are looking to peddle us anything, Your Grace,” the Karstark said. “And if they are, I damn well ain’t buying it.”

Sigorn laughed. It made Jon smile, too. “Neither am I,” he assured the man. “But there is some small chance these men were only sailing to Braavos or Skagos to offload some fine red wool. I have heard the color is not of fashion in the South, as of late.”

The tense faces of the men around Jon eased a little. One Thenn whispered something to a Karstark man, who laughed. “And there is a greater chance,” Jon went on, watching them all, “that they are Southron prisoners, escaped from their cells and fleeing the queen’s justice.”

This caught their attention, all at once. The Karstark bristled, his hackles well raised. “And if they are?” he asked. “Your Grace.”

The Thenns had brought new blood to Karhold, and they had driven out before them what Southron sensibilities might have lingered there, brought north from the returned prisoners or cultivated when the many armies had gathered and marched. Jon leaned back a little on his rock, looking up at them, and said, “Then it’s a matter of law. Law of the Seven Kingdoms says it’s right and just to send back shipwreckers, no matter who they are.”

If the Karstark was a hound, Jon thought, he would be reared to the end of his chain and snarling now. He said to Jon, very coldly, “That’s Southron law from the Southron throne.”

This time there was no _Your Grace_. “Aye,” Jon agreed easily. The other men were stirring now, muttering amongst themselves. Some drew closer to better hear what was being said. Davos, beside Jon, was as tense as a strung bow and gave Jon an urgent look. 

Jon had received that particular look before. Usually it came when he was going to do something rash, and Davos unable to stop him. “You look hungry, Lord Hand,” he said and offered Davos the wrap of food that yet lay untouched.

The men stirred impatiently. Davos could not refuse Jon, the same as he could not question Jon; he would not risk it when there were so many others around, watching between them. He took a piece of the dried meat, his glare vicious.

Jon waited until Davos was well into it, his teeth glued together, before he said smoothly to the Karstark, “Eddard Stark did not die on the steps of Baelor’s Sept to keep us following Southron law. Robb Stark did not die at the Twins to keep us chained under Southron law. And I did not die and rise again to bow and scrape and only pretend not to bend the knee.”

“If the queen wanted these men to face her justice, she should have kept them chained in the South, instead of letting them come crawl all over our lands. They’re in the North now and we make our own laws. Let them face the king’s justice.”

Davos choked and covered his mouth to hack out a cough. Jon watched from the corner of his eye as Sigorn, easy beside him, offered Davos a flask of water, and so received the glare that should by rights have scorched across Jon’s face. 

“Aye,” the Karstark said, looking cheered, but from behind him one of Jon’s own men said quietly, “Your Grace.”

Farlen Selys, Torrhen’s Square stock who’d come to man a guard at Winterfell during the war, wed a kitchen lass there, and had never left. He set a fine snare; he could ride two days without feeling the need to speak. “Selys,” Jon said and sat himself straighter to attend to him. “Come and speak, if you would.”

He stepped past the Karstark and bowed deeply. “You speak true, Your Grace,” he said in a low rasp. “And I would not question. But is justice not justice? Better to give these men back to the South and wash our hands of it than put ire where there need be none.”

He looked down at the scrap of cloth, red like blood on the sand, and said, “Dead’s dead, Your Grace. I’m speaking as a man who lost his brother and his uncle at the Twins. Dead is dead and that’s satisfaction enough to me.”

But it was clear he was one of the few who thought so. The Karstarks and the Thenns and most of Jon’s own guards disagreed.

Jon did not look to put ire where there was none. The ravens came first to him, and for good reason. When news of the first execution had come, Jon had written and in clear terms set out exactly why his lords and ladies should not be privy to the manner. So now it was Jon’s own hand that copied out the words, that they might be sent to other lords to be kept abreast of the trials and the news.

Jon might salvage it yet, putting them to the sword and giving no reason, other than t’was his right.

He did not mean to stir ire, or garner unease. He did not much like to plant seeds of hatred down at the base of the Neck, where the rich earth and warm weather would see it grow well. The North traded with the South, wed their blood to the South, had fought beside the South.

What Daenerys did with her people was her business, until now. Now the ties of decency that muzzled Jon fell aside, chewed through to shredding by sharp teeth. Now lions were in the North again, had come so close to the home of his kin, had come so close to killing his kin.

Jon did not like to do it. But Daenerys had made it his business. Jon was king, and his duty was to _his_ people. The Winter King was the North, in name and honor and spirit, and so now it was the business of the North.

“Mayhaps you have the right of it. Mayhaps I would agree with you,” Jon said. He kept his voice even, calm. “And certainly I thank you for speaking. But you know not the whole matter, Selys. If it was a matter only of keeping good relations between us, I would take these men alive and send them off south still smiling.”

He showed them his teeth. “But as your king,” Jon said, “and knowing what I do, I cannot. Call it vanity, if you like.”

It was not just the single Karstark who was listening now. It was not just his little huddle of men watching. Around them, the conversations in Westerosi and Old Tongue and the pidgin mix of the two died out like embers in the snow.

Davos made a great effort to swallow, his hand out pleadingly to Jon, but he was not quick enough. His teeth were still glued shut.

“When someone asks my men, ‘what kind of man is the king?’ I want them to be able to say, ‘A man who knows the feel of dragonfire,’” Jon said. “’A man who will not stand to see another man put to it.’”

Selys went ashen. “Your Grace,” he said in his low soft voice. “Your Grace—”

The Karstark shouted out, aghast, “She's burning them?”

After that, the outcry was fierce. It caught like fire on dry tinder between the Stark and Karstark men, then carried to the Thenns, who all looked furious and grim to have it explained to them. Beside him, Sigorn reached out and put his hand like a shackle to Jon’s wrist.

Sigorn had no words. He only gave Jon a look, deep rage and horror. “Aye,” Jon said, leaning in close and speaking low. “And what could I tell you, any of you? After the wars we had? I wanted only good blood between us when the queen left.”

“Blood,” Sigorn said back. His hand eased a little but his eyes were still intent on Jon’s face. “What blood? No blood, if fire, huh? Only ash.”

“Aye,” Jon said. Alys had been disturbed when he’d told her, but Jon hadn’t pressed the deeper knowledge on her. But Sigorn knew; his face said it plain. 

The memories crawled up Jon’s throat the same as they curled in Sigorn’s head; smoke and thawing rotting meat and the startling blasts of heat in the black cold. The screaming and the furious crash of metal. Jon made himself swallow down his disquiet, his unease, and said, “I will not send them back.”

He included Davos in his look, in his words. Davos, grim with it but not wroth, as he offered Jon a nod. Just as Davos could not refuse Jon, so too could Jon not back down from it now. He was glad of the shackle, that he couldn’t be convinced otherwise.

“The last time there was a dragon in th’ south, he was burning people too! He was burning _Starks_!” a Karstark man shouted at a Thenn, who roared something back in the Old Tongue.

It had gone on long enough. Jon climbed to his feet, weary, and called, “Enough!”

He was no Lord Umber, but his voice rose over theirs and over the sounds of the ocean, the cries of the shorebirds. The shouting quieted as Sigorn stood as well and Davos choked down his mouthful at last and got his feet under himself.

“I will not do it,” Jon said. The words were good and true in his mouth. It eased him to say it, to know that he was not just posturing for the men. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.

“I will not send these men south again. Unless you wish to persuade me that burning a man to death is a just way to die? He ends up dead, after all, and so that does honor the laws.” 

He gave them a moment of silence, and it stood empty. None spoke. “Any one of you, make me an argument towards it. I would listen if you like.”

He looked face to face, slowly. None spoke. Two looked away, too young to have witnessed the war, but the others met his eyes. The Karstark man demanded, “Those cowards came to flee justice?”

Farlen Selys met Jon’s eyes. “These men came running from dragonfire, Your Grace?” he asked, before Jon could reply.

“All I know of the matter is this,” Jon said, “that dragonfire is what awaits them, that they are Lannisters and likely prisoners, and that the South was fool enough to let them escape. I will not call these men cowards, though they might deserve being so named. No man likes to sit and wait to die, and men who are being killed for their lack of honor are not men who will be graceful in letting their lives end.” 

“But I question you,” he said, “would they have run if all that awaited them was the sword? Would they foul our lands now if it was a headsman and a block and bones for their families to bury?”

He did not give them chance to reply, only watched the little groups break and shuffle and mutter to each other as Jon turned to Sigorn.

Sigorn had his own lip curled; he gave Jon a short nod. “What’s the law of the far North, Lord Magnar?” Jon asked loud enough that they all could hear, when he’d given the men long enough to speak amongst themselves. “Same as the law south of the Wall? What say the Thenns on how a prisoner should die?”

Sigorn gave Jon a slow, considering look, then said with teeth in it, “You say he die? You swing your sword.”

“So you have it,” Jon said and turned back to the Karstark. He did not yell, only made his voice calm and easy to hear. “I’d say few alive like lions less than me. But that does not mean I will send a man back south to die by dragonfire when he has gone through all the trouble of coming to my shore to escape it. When we find these Lannister men, if they are not cut down fighting where they stand, I will say to my Lord Hand, ‘Lord Davos, fetch me a block.’”

They made their own laws now. They were not beholden to the Southron crown, to the Southron law. T’was their own justice and honor, and them to decide on what that meant. It settled to men, Jon’s talk on it, and the murmur that picked up was approving.

Sigorn said something in the Old Tongue to the Thenn nearest him, then told the Karstark man who still lingered in his place, “You not tired? Maybe we go now, huh?”

“No, my lord,” the Karstark said. He bowed low, first to Sigorn, then to Jon. “This seems a fine place to rest awhile.” And he left them to settle again. 

Sigorn put his hand to Jon’s arm and forced Jon to sit as well. He put a piece of bread in Jon’s hand and waited mercilessly until Jon took a bite of it.

He chewed, he swallowed, he ate. But his mind was far now, turning and turning on the matter still.

It had been enough to settle the men, and they were witness enough that Jon was now bound to his word. If the notion of his choice spread beyond Karhold, say as far as Winterfell where such state matters were still looked at with keen eyes and Jon’s actions needed better justifying, Jon need simply send for a few Karstark men. They would well settle the matter to his lords, and brook no argument for it. 

It helped, too, that not all the old men and women died. Word would spread when they returned to Karhold, and those older men and women would like Jon’s choice as well. There still lived those who remembered when Rickard and Brandon Stark went south and what befell them there.

Daenerys and Jon had parted in peace, but Jon could not make himself a dragon when he was born a wolf. He might still be green in the eyes of many, and untutored in the North’s ways in the eyes of others. 

That was true and Jon felt keenly the weight of it. His old pack was gone; there was no one left to show him the way of it. Would his true father, not his seed-father, have done it? Would Eddard Stark have sent men to be burned alive? Would Robb?

Jon would not know. He would never know. His hand stole away to his pocket and he touched the cloth he had hidden there. Would that his brother was with him, even for a moment! Would that he had his father’s ear again, a scrap of advice from Eddard Stark’s mouth!

All that thinking such things did now was hurt him. He made himself let the aching lonely thought go.

T’was on Jon’s shoulders now, that his country and his people held to their ways. T’was on his shoulders rested the future of the North, that it was a future they could be proud of. He could not falter and he could not fail when the gods set him to such a task, raising him and keeping him alive through the war and guiding Jon to kneel in the godswood and make new vows when his lords laid their swords before him.

The thought of the godswood stirred up other thoughts. Unbidden, came the question. Would Arya have done it?

Would Arya have sent men to be burned alive?

It was a foolish question and Jon felt a fool to ask it, even to himself. Arya, with her tender heart, with her outrage every time Jon was slighted, with her insistence that everything be fair and if it was not, to force the matter to be fair with just her own determination to make it so. 

Arya was not there, and though Jon thought he knew her answer, it might a long time before Jon saw her again, before he could ask her opinion on the matter.

It felt like a testing ground; all of it seemed a trial of Jon’s own. The men who came to his land, the justice they were fleeing from, the danger they gave to Jon’s people, the archer—

Would the archer have done it? 

The Braavosi liked the Breaker of Chains but they had no love for dragons. He remembered from the night before, how furious those flat brown eyes had seemed that Jon had been threatened at all. 

But she had shot well and true, despite her rage. The third man had never felt the blow; he had not suffered; he had died with the first arrow to his eye. No, Jon thought, the archer would not suffer the men to burn.

He stroked his fingers over the coarse cording of the Lannister cloth. The archer favored the arrow; her way was almost as quick and neat as the sword.

On his honor as a king, Jon could not consign the men to dragonfire. On his honor as a man, he would not let it be the arrow either.

But Jon’s honor as a man only went so far. 

The seabirds had all scattered from the shouting. The only eyes on him now were his men's and thus familiar and easy to bear. The hair on the back of Jon’s neck lay easy. 

The archer would not get a block if she kept at her little game, Jon thought to himself as Sigorn snorted and grinned the easy grin of a hound with his quarry on its back foot. He did not know what the archer _would_ get from him, beyond what she had taken so brazenly and undeservedly, but it would be ought else.

The breeze smelled only of seasalt. The inside of Jon’s mouth tasted sharply metallic. Once he had unmasked from her the face of a mouse she hid behind, and saw what was underneath, he would decide.

But not a block. Jon didn’t want to kill her. She was sly and bold; she was made of silver and jewel in the moonlight; she had come to Jon to see. He liked her a little more than the lions.

“There will be trouble from this if Her Grace gets word,” Davos said to Jon in a low voice as they made ready to leave, putting aside the last of the food. Ghost was going from man to man now, not begging for scraps but saying with his wise red eyes, _Is it not better to make a friend of a full wolf than the enemy of a hungry one?_

“I almost hope she does hear of it,” Jon said. He felt steadier, good and true. “It will be an important lesson to Her Grace.”

Blood of his blood. Jon’s blood was Northron blood, filled with shards of ice that not even the hottest fire could melt.

“And what lesson is that?” Davos asked. He did not look nervous, exactly, but his face to Jon held a new light when their eyes met.

His face did not say, _This boy is mad_. His face did not say, _My king is mad_ , either. Jon could not name what it said, though it brought to mind strongly the faces of Lord Commander Mormont and Lord Eddard Stark.

He offered his arm to pull Sigorn up and Sigorn took it. Blood of my blood, Jon thought. A wolf could make a pack of hounds, if the wolf but slowed when he ran and consented to sleep his pack by a fire now and then.

“That she need guard her prisoners better,” Jon said, “lest her mess pass on to other shores. That if it does, the men there will resolve it as they see fit.” Along with Longclaw he had a short curved blade of the style that the Thenns favored for cutting brush. He picked it up, hefted the weight of it, and swallowed down his want to smile.

“That we are not the same as them,” Jon went on. “Her Grace is young, and lost only a few toothless lions. Better for her to learn this lesson now than later.”

“Aye,” Sigorn said. He knew more than he let on. He understood better than he let on. “Dragon queen not only one with teeth, huh?” And he snapped his own, playful.

“Aye,” Jon said back and clapped a hand to Sigorn’s shoulder. He gave him a little shake. Ghost, his paws in the water, got his teeth around some seagrass and tossed it high with a sharp shake of his neck, water drops sparkling like precious stones as they fell around him.

“Aye,” Jon said again. He could not keep himself from smiling. “Exactly.”

Their party searched with great energy after that, even as the hours of the day slipped closer to sunset. Jon didn’t think the men wanted to see the Lannisters put to the sword. He did not think any man, after living through the War for the Dawn, could take a thing so lightly when they had all starved together and froze together and clashed their weapons endlessly against the cold skin, the dead flesh, the icy swords of their common enemy. 

But still, fighting next to a man did not erase all that had come before that moment. It did not lay to bed forever what the men around you had done, what you had done. The war had made strange bedfellows, but the war was over now.

Spring was sun and warmth and light. You need not huddle too close to others when those things were around you.

Winter was made for survival, Jon thought. But you had chance to make choices again, when it was Spring. You had a chance to rebuild what you’d had before, what you’d had in those long glossy golden days before the snows fell and the dark swept over you and wiped everything else away.

But even so, Northron honor. It held all of them harder than the South had ever known. The Lannister men would die, of this Jon had no doubt.

But he also knew, better put them to sword than to see them put on a boat south, towards dragonfire. He could not be the only one who felt so about the matter. So they all of them, Stark and Karstark and Thenn alike, looked harder in the caves they found, scratching at the loose scree and sand that patterned the floors, peering into corners they would have passed before.

Too, they checked the beach itself and the footpaths leading up the cliffs. A man in a hurry might take apart his night camp, but too he might forget to wipe away his footsteps behind himself.

The Thenns were good hunters and the Karstarks had been wolves once too. In the red light of the dusk, just as the wind was starting to bite their faces instead of kiss it, and they walked more with their boots in the encroaching seawater than in sand, a hoarse shout came from one of the parties not too far away from Jon’s own.

They dragged him from his cave like so many terriers dragging a rat from its nest. He was reeking and unshaven and trembling where he stood, wet up to his waist with seawater, and his blue eyes filled with tears when he saw Jon approaching.

“Mercy,” he said, his mouth a-tremble. “Mercy, I beg you,” and the Thenns clutching his arms shouted in surprise as the man went limp and folded to his knees.

“Get up,” Jon said but the man shook his head. Once upon a time his hair might have been golden but sweat and grease turned it a pale mousy brown. Thick scars, like from a rope from hanging, spanned the man’s throat.

“Please,” the man said and that was all he said. The rest was swallowed by weeping, high and frantic and afraid, an ugly rasping noise from his ruined throat.

The men murmured around them. Sigorn looked at the man with disgust, and Davos with some small concern. Jon went to move, but one of the Thenns beat him to the motion. He crouched down by the man and took his waterskin from his belt. The man stank of seawater and sweat, rotting seagrass; his lips were cracked and bleeding.

Jon had learned everything that a lord and a leader should learn by standing as a child at Eddard Stark’s knee. Those lessons were buried in Jon’s bones, deeper than any dragonseed blood that might course through his veins.

The Thenns had lashed the man’s arms behind his back. This Thenn, young and tired-looking, who hadn’t met Jon’s eyes, helped the Lannister drink and when he turned his face away from the skin, Jon said to the Lannister, “You’ve landed in Karhold. Know you this place?”

“Yes,” the man said and trembled. “Yes, my lord. Lord Karstark.” His eyes rolled wildly in his sockets as he looked at them, like he might fit at any moment. He said like a child, “The sun of winter. Yes, a white sunburst on black. Please do not send me back. Please. I am not so important, just a soldier, just a man—”

“I am not the lord of anything,” Jon said patiently. Ghost stood not too far, his nose tipped to the evening wind and his body easy. He felt Jon watching him; he turned those red eyes to Jon’s face. “To me,” Jon said and watched the man’s face lose all color but the muddy shadowed light of the dusk as Ghost came to stand by Jon.

“Your Grace,” the man said distantly and the spark of panic in his eyes died. Everything in him washed away, until he could have been a corpse dragged rotting out of the ocean waves. 

It chilled Jon, the swift ugly change. He did not like the man begging and pleading; he liked less the funeral mask that descended over him when he saw the wolf. He could not speak to what the man thought, seeing Jon standing there, or why he changed as he did.

It made Jon recall the archer, how suddenly and swiftly she had gone from a living thing, an interesting hidden thing, to nothing at all. He had not known then either what caused the change. He grit his teeth.

“There are few Lannisters who can come to the North expecting to live,” Jon said. He swallowed his irritated unease well. His voice did not crack or waver. He did not have to speak over the man; he fell silent but for the faint hush of his breaths at the first sight of Ghost. “And fewer still who would come here and ask of me anything.” 

Around him waited the Karstarks, the Starks, the Thenns. “I will offer you this only,” Jon said. “The boat or the sword.”

The man’s eyes filled with tears and spilled over. The mask he wore broke into pieces to lie in the sand; terror poured away from underneath it until he almost seemed a person again. “Bless you,” he gasped. He was shaking, his teeth almost chattering together as if from strong cold. “Father bless you. The sword. The sword!”

He could not like the man. He could not condemn him. “Keep your Southron blessing,” Jon said. “It’s not those new gods who gave it to you.” He turned away to Sigorn; the adoration come suddenly over that grey face made him feel ill inside. “Is there a horse for him waiting above?”

Sigorn spat at the man’s feet then. He said something in the Old Tongue to the Thenns holding the man and they heaved him up and turned him towards the cliff path.

“Those new gods,” one Thenn nearby to them said in a thick voice. “Ha! No worship those. What good they do? Our gods better. Old gods!”

“Old justice,” Sigorn said back. His chin was up and his face was proud. In the last of the sunlight, he could have been a hundred. He could have been his own father, before the war, before the Others, looking on stubborn and proud.

The Thenns, Jon thought, last of the First Men and the oldest blood in Karhold now, and all of them mixing with Alys’ people to make the new.

Sigorn said, “Old honor.”

ALYS waited for them at the orchard wall, barely a single step inside the gate, her small bare feet peeking out from under the skirts of her dress. The men had not exactly been a merry party coming back, with a Lannister sitting among them still trembling with spent fear, but they _had_ found the man and Jon well knew; one rat led to another. 

At least the tension of the morning was gone. Better in Sigorn and Davos’ eyes that t’was Lannisters than a planned assassination attempt. The cloud had lifted from them both, even as it lingered long over Jon.

So they were not un-merry either. Sigorn in particular was in high spirits as he reined his horse up just short of his wife and said growlingly to her, “Woman!”

“I am still inside!” she yelped as Sigorn dismounted and advanced towards her. She gave a squeal and turned to run but a moment too late. He caught her up and kissed her so thoroughly that the Karstarks and the Thenns started to whistle and cheer.

Spring, and the North was thawing. Jon was smiling at it, watching with half an eye to where the Lannister man was being helped from his horse, when the fine hairs at the back of his neck rose to crackling points.

Ghost, from his place at Jon’s heel, shot past the gate and into the keep.

It was spite that made Jon do it, the deep irritation that he had carried around with himself all day. The archer had stolen so much; his little Nymeria, Ghost’s affections, the dreaming, Jon’s attention just when he needed it most on other things. He would not let her take this too, the justice Jon had promised the Lannister man. The justice Jon had promised his own people.

It was easy enough to slip aside with all the attention focused on Alys, and with others coming from the keep now, women seeking out their own husbands, children running with delighted screams to be scooped up and set upon their fathers’ horses. “With me,” Jon said to the Thenns playing nursemaid to their prisoner. “We’ll take him to the reception room to be fed.”

The Thenns for a moment looked doubtful. “He ate the lady’s bread,” Jon reminded them, “and raised no sword to us. Let him be comfortable until I find the time I need to speak with him.”

He walked with them, slowly, until he saw the Lannister to the door of the hall. It made Jon uneasy to do it, not just from the need to watch above himself as he had not before—his eyes on the walks that followed the curtain walls, the tops of the buildings, the high arrow-slit windows and open glass panes—but because of the way the Lannister had looked at Jon when he said it, all glossy eyes and stunned face.

When the heavy doors to the hall swung shut at their heels, Jon turned away. He didn’t think a mouse so bold as to kill a lion in full firelight, in front of so many witnesses, but Jon was wary. He didn’t know yet what the archer was hiding under her mousy mask. It could have been any face, any sharp set of deadly teeth.

The Braavosi were sly and clever and Jon could not parse their way of it. He put his hand to the pommel of his sword and kept it there as he turned and looked through the shadows that lay thick and thicker as the sun fully set.

If not for Ghost, he might have looked right past her. Her face was the same, that dull round mask that made it difficult to recall her, but she was dressed differently, in a plain neat dress and apron, with a scarf covering her hair like some of the other smallfolk women wore.

She was unarmed, so far as Jon could see, as he crossed the yard towards her. It took him a moment to understand why there was no scabbard or bow at hand for her; it took him a moment to push past the irritation of seeing Ghost press his white face to her uncovered hands and muddy his tail ticking it back and forth in the dirt. 

She was not dressed as just any one of the smallfolk. She was dressed as a serving woman.

The outrage, the absurdity, the _impudence_ that she would come uninvited into Alys’ hall, pretending to be one of Alys’ people—

Ghost scattered away a full four steps ahead of Jon and his wrath, but the archer stayed where she was, mild and unresisting as Jon took her by her forearms and slammed her into the kitchen wall.

The world narrowed. Jon’s mouth was wet with spit, was aching with the want to bite; Ghost pressed close to his side and whuffled silently, concerned air against Jon’s shoulder.

He could not risk the magic she had placed on the wolf. Jon snapped, “Away, Ghost,” and waited until he was certain the wolf had retreated. And then to the archer, he said darkly, “Did you really think I would allow this? That I would not care about you passing yourself off as my lady cousin’s own servant, and all to kill the man I have brought here to her halls under mine own protection?”

Those flat brown eyes were almost black, hidden as the two of them were in the shadows between the torchlight. She said softly, “Good evening, Your Grace. I see your hunt went well today.”

He grit his teeth. She could try and smear a thin layer of civility over it all she liked, but it would not help hide what she had come to do. “Don’t pretend that you weren’t following us all along,” he said and squeezed her arms tightly. “Don’t pretend you did not see my success.”

Her look changed at once, but in such a small way that any man who looked less intently at her would have missed it. Whatever was hidden behind the blankness of her eyes stirred a little. “I cannot say that I did,” she said, low and riled to the warm air between them. “I was south of here, looking for the wroth one, and just now returned when the light began to die.”

“Liar,” Jon snarled, but the word did not taste right in his mouth. He peered down at her dull blank face and her flat black eyes and considered a long moment. He had felt her watching him. He was certain he had felt eyes on his face, his back.

The archer said, almost sullenly now, “He hacked a tree to pieces. I found the tree and I found his trail and then he did _something_. He thought something, or changed the way he thought on it, and I lost him again.” Her thin mouth pursed. “So _I_ thought to come and check that the next target of his sword had not been your head.”

He looked at her, hesitant, and she looked back. “You don’t believe me,” the archer said, staring up at him. Her eyes were coming alive; her mask was falling away. Jon knew, suddenly and truly, that he was not the only one brought off his kilter when they spoke.

She snapped, offended, “Lord Thenn sent six men a-horse to look for their boat but only one went off as scout to you when they found it. That one was on a roan horse, had a bronze sword, and he liked to whistle, though I cannot name the song he favored.”

Jon eased his grip on her arms a little. She spoke true. “Aye,” he said. “Aye, alright. You were south of here and found another?”

Her voice became a little more sour. It lost the delicate tone of courtesy it had held, almost the whole time they had spoken before. “I found trace of him,” she said. “But I cannot see the way he will run. I cannot see how he will go, I cannot tell how he will _think_ , and so I cannot find him. Only the bits he leaves behind.”

The distant torches turned the soft skin of her face and neck to honey-gold. Under the scent of the kitchen, she smelled a little like horse and a little like sweat. She had been busy hunting, same as Jon.

“Mine was in a cave,” Jon said. He could not speak as to why he said it, only that he did. That he wanted to share it with her, that he wanted her to know. “He spoke with me a little, though I need more words with him before he dies. They did not come here for me.”

He thought it might ease the archer to learn it. She had been so wroth the night before, that they might’ve come there to kill him. But now she didn’t much react. She only said, “ _Yours_ ,” in a scoff, irritated with him still. 

“Were you the one who found him, Your Grace,” she demanded, “or was it m’lord’s Thenns?”

M’lord. It landed on him like a slap across his face. Jon grit his teeth. It wasn’t Sigorn she had gone to see; it was not Sigorn who she seemed determined to set to rage. Sigorn was nothing to her. “My men brought him back,” Jon said. “It does not matter who found him.”

They looked at each other again in silence. The knock Jon had given her when he shoved her against the wall had made her scarf fall askew and some wild curls were escaping. Her eyes were alive now, fully, enormous and luminously dark. 

“I want to see him,” the archer said, staring back and lifting her chin a little.

It took Jon a bare moment to realize what she was talking about. “No,” he said, sputtering. “No! Are you mad? You came here to kill him, you told me so from your own mouth!”

That mouth curved down at the corners. The archer’s eyes flashed. “I’m not armed!” she said and tried to jerk away from his hold. “I didn’t eat m’lady’s bread, I’m not m’lady’s guest, and I never brought any of my weapons into m’lady’s walls. It would be evil of me to do that. It would be poor of any woman.”

The North held guest rights sacred, especially now. The archer knew that. Jon did not know why she would also honor them, what Braavosi trickery she had planned once he let his guard down. He quit his hold on one of her arms and watching her carefully, touched the curve of her waist on both sides. 

The cloth of her dress was thin, the sleeves, the panels at her waist. She didn’t wear a bodice underneath it. He could feel the heat of her skin through the thin weave, and he could not feel the hidden shape of a long knife. 

Her eyes burned up at him, full of some unnameable emotion, but she allowed it.

She would need more than the small blades she might hide in her sleeve, her pockets, her smallclothes. He made his mind turn from the thought. She’d need a large blade, not to kill the man, but to escape Jon afterwards if she did. His hand still on her arm tightened, a warning, but she only huffed a little and raised a brow. 

“Let me see him,” she pressed when Jon withdrew his other hand back to her arm as well. “He knows something about mine. And about the third. I haven’t seen anything of the third.”

“Neither have I,” Jon murmured as he thought.

She hated lions just as much as Jon. And she had saved his life; he owed her something. “If you make move to hurt him, or anyone else,” he said, “it will be your head on the block next.”

And then he let her other arm go and stepped well away. The cloth of her dress was poorly woven, rough. His burnt fingers burned still with the touch of it and he closed them slowly into a fist, wanting the feel of it to go away.

The archer waited a moment, still staring at him, then nodded. “I won’t,” she said and turned towards the kitchens again. The door was propped open, mayhaps twenty paces away, and the light of the lanterns and the fire spilled out from it. It caught the archer’s eyes when she turned back, changed the flat brown to something else, something strange and molten. It stole his breath right out of his lungs.

“I won’t,” she said again. Her hands went to her skirts, raised them a little to her calves. Her legs were long, strongly muscled. She waited until Jon raised his eyes to her face again to say, “But if I did, and you thought to kill me, you’d have to catch me first.”

And then she was gone, a fast turn of her heel and herself free to run with her skirts held as they were. She went through the doorway and Jon could not follow her, could not grab her and shake her and demand that she stop stealing things from him, not without exposing them both.

And he could not do that. The thick disgusting thought chased itself around his head as his fingers still felt the touch of her, the curve of her side. She was his, his quarry. 

Ghost’s wise eyes, in the light of the torch he sat under, were ruby and blood-drop. He yawned at Jon, licking at his own mouth, and then stood to amble towards the kitchen himself.

Jon’s jaw ached and gritting his teeth so roughly together made it worse. The day was not over yet; the gods still wanted their due. “With me, Ghost,” he said and turned on his heel back towards the orchard gate.

The rest of the party had dispersed, the men and the horses, until only a handful of Karstarks, a pair of Thenns standing at curious attention, Jon’s own men, and the lord and lady of the keep were left. 

Alys was done being kissed now, but Sigorn had picked her up rather than let her go. She hung her arm about his shoulders, letting herself be carried, as she spoke to a Karstark man. When she noticed Jon approaching she turned and reached out her other hand for him to clasp.

“Who was that man?” she asked with a quick curious look that followed the path Jon had escorted the prisoner down. “I do not think I know him.”

“My lady,” Jon said and bowed over her hand. “A Lannister. One of the six who came to your land, took your guest-right in false faith, and need see justice done to them.”

Her face changed just a little. “Put me down,” she said to her husband and touched his cheek sweetly, quickly.

Jon flexed his fingers again, still half-aching with those quick touches to the archer’s waist. He returned Sigorn’s disgruntled look with a shrug; Alys could not be argued with. Sigorn set her to her feet again.

“A Lannister,” Alys said in a low voice and took Jon’s arm, drawing him to the side and well away from the loitering men. “You’re certain?” she asked and her eyes searched his face.

“We had proof just after noon,” Jon told her, “and then confirmation from the man’s own mouth.” He didn’t want to lose the touch still on his fingers, but Alys looked so unhappy. He put his hand on her own, where she’d grabbed at his arm. “No doubt he will have more to say on the matter when I question him.”

“A Lannister,” Alys said again. She turned her round eyes to the hall, to the building in which the man now sat. “I never thought—” she said and paused to swallow. “In my walls. In my own keep.”

Her voice was thick with emotion, too many to parse out and untangle. Her father had killed Lannisters; the Lannisters had cut her brothers down. T’was a Lannister army had ridden north under Ser Jaime Goldhand and a Lannister force that was brought dragged behind Queen Daenerys’ own men when she came.

Alys had cursed them; she had nursed them. Fed them and hated them and sent them all back south, thinking never to see a one of them again.

“Aye,” Jon said and took her hand from his arm, squeezing gently at her fingers. Her eyes to him said that she floundered; he put his hand to her shoulder. She swayed into the touch and her own hand went to her belly, stroking over the heavy swell of it, a hand to soothe herself or soothe the babe.

“Why did he come?” Alys asked instead of answering. She sounded faint. Her eyes were very distant now, not on the hall or the yard, but farther still. “Why did any of them come? The lions have no friends in the North.”

Did she see her brothers, wherever she looked to? Her eyes, Jon saw, were glassy with tears. Did she look yet upon her father’s face?

“I do not know about the others,” Jon admitted, “but this one here was plain enough that we can guess. He slipped his chains for fear of dragonfire, and I suppose the rest did as well.”

“He fled the queen’s justice,” Jon said. Alys turned those eyes to him again, almost colorless in the torchlight, and Jon went on carefully, “T’was not malice that gave me this cut yesterday, only chance. He and his fellows were frightened beyond anything of being caught alive when shipwreckers’ law would see them returned back from whence they came.”

The torchlight couldn’t pretend to the bright sunlight of the morning they had walked and spoken. But Jon couldn’t cast it from his mind and let it rest in the darkness either. T’was not fair to Alys, t’was not fair to himself, and t’was not fair to the memory of her family, when there was a Lannister yet waiting the sword in her own halls.

“You spoke to me once of something you craved,” he said gently, “that you could not find on your own tables. Would you yet sup, if I could fetch it to you now?”

Her hand stroked and stroked. Did the babe kick and turn in her belly? Did she hope it was a boy after all, that she might bless it with the name of the brothers she had lost?

She said nothing for a long fragile moment, her mouth trembling wildly. “There is no shame in it to find that you are not hungry anymore,” Jon murmured. “It’s Spring and you are Spring’s lady now. If vengeance will not tempt you eat, then let me take this man away and deal with him, that you might fill your belly with something else.”

She shut her eyes a moment, her hand stilled, and she opened them again.

“I am not hungry for vengeance,” Alys said. “If I ever was, the war froze it out of me. Starved it clean away. But I want justice. I want justice done as my father taught my brothers to do it. As my mother taught me.”

She looked up at him. “That is what I want,” she said. “Give that to me to fill my belly up and I will be well content with it.”

She’d called Jon wise, but sometimes he felt half a child beside her. “Aye,” he said, humbled a little. “Aye, you’ll have it. I need only speak with him before. He knows things about the missing two, information that I would have. But after—”

Her eyes watched his hand as Jon put it to the pommel of Longclaw and wrapped his tight burnt fingers around the carved wolf head.

“Aye,” Alys breathed out. “Aye, and I would go with you.” She held herself as proud as any queen. Rare had it been that Jon met a Northron girl who did not have twice the pride of a Southron lass, and rarer still was it that her pride did not rest in the right things.

“As you say, lady,” he said and returned her to Sigorn. Sigorn wanted more guards with them, and Davos insisted on a scribe to take down what was said, and t’was easy in the ruckus of arranging for it all for Jon to slip in that a serving woman ought to come as well, to see that all were comfortable.

They didn’t need any lords as witnesses; the Lannister man’s own hand on the scribework and Davos’ seal would be enough. Still, it seemed an age and a half before they found a passable hand in one of the maester’s helper boys, and even longer before they could get on with questioning the man.

When finally they settled down in the reception room, Jon was jittery with restless energy. It was the right way to do things, he knew it, but Jon was not a man well suited to idleness. He touched the pommel of his sword, Ghost’s carved head, the cloth in his pocket.

He only made himself still and assume some small dignity when the serving woman came in, the tray balanced carefully in her hands, and began to set out cups for the ale and the wine. Her skirts were back in order, her scarf tied into its proper place, her face soft and round and blank as she curtsied to them and lowered her eyes demurely.

“We’re ready,” Davos told Jon after a long moment conferring with the scribe.

“Aye,” Jon said and took his eyes from the serving woman by force. The writing board the lad had was scarred and spotted with ink but he put a clean piece of parchment atop it and his hand was graceful with the pen as he wrote out the year and the date. It would do, Jon supposed, for a record.

Alys was clinging to Sigorn’s arm, but still hard-eyed. She met Jon’s eyes and gave him a little nod. They couldn’t shift from it, or back away. Jon thought he couldn’t be the only one who didn’t _want_ to. He rounded the low table the Thenn guard had dragged in and looked down at the Lannister.

He was not as grey-faced as before, and his trembling had settled to exhausted stillness. A man could not hold his terror forever, Jon knew. Either it washed away or his heart gave out.

“Your Grace,” the man said, though the meaty hand that his guard kept on his shoulder prevented him from even trying to rise. 

Jon offered him a tense nod. “Your name,” he said, and to keep the grey from leaching back into the man’s face and terror from sealing up his lips, “that I might introduce you to your lady hostess.”

Alys did not much look like she wanted an introduction, but when the man opened his mouth and croaked out, “Tyland Lannister, my lady. Of the Lannisport Lannisters, and an even lesser one at that. I would—”

He swallowed, the scars on his throat rippling, and said a little louder, “I would thank you. You did not mean us the kindness, but to feed us when you might have left a thief to starve deserves what paltry praise I can give it.”

Jon turned to look at Alys, who shut her eyes a moment, her knuckles white where she grasped Sigorn’s arm. “Better,” she managed, “to do kindness to an enemy, than to do my people a harm. And it put you under guest-right.” Her breath shuddered in and out of her chest. “I am sure,” she said, “you understand how seriously we take guest-right.”

The Lannister swallowed again and touched a hand to his throat. He lowered his eyes and nodded.

“I would sit, if I may, Your Grace,” Alys said to Jon. Her own face was a little pale and if it had been anyone else, Jon might have suggested she leave the business to them. But it was Alys, and she could not be argued with.

“Aye, as you like,” Jon said on habit, but he knew exactly what scene Alys would like to present to the Lannister. He sat himself down at the table, directly across from the prisoner, and gave the others a moment to settle themselves as well.

The serving woman went around, pouring. She was quick about it and graceful; if she had been anyone else, Jon was certain he would forget that she was even there. She stilled a moment next to him, waiting, and Jon watched that soft blank face as he asked the Lannister, “Will you drink?”

“Ale, Your Grace,” the man said in his hoarse voice. 

The archer poured, then turned towards Jon again. Her eyes cut to his face then away. “Ale as well,” Jon said and the moment after she poured, Ghost jolted upright from his place near the hearth and knocked the pokers to the floor.

Everyone else looked toward the noise, iron on stone. Only the archer watched as Jon changed the cups and leaned back again in his chair. Her look was blankness as she bowed and retreated to stand near the wall, but something simmered under it.

Satisfied, Jon made signal to the scribe, who dipped his pen to the ink-pot and waited.

“We’ll begin with your call to muster,” Jon said, laying his own hands upon the table, his fingers loose. “Name your liege lord who had command of you, the company you served in, and the date as best you can recall that you joined to the army.”

The Lannister man rubbed at his eyes. “I rallied to Ser Jaime Lannister’s forces, under his father’s orders, late in the year 298, or early in the year of 299. We didn’t keep script-count of the moon turns. I cannot name the month. I served in the mounted cavalry as a lesser officer, and was given order of four dozen mounted men, to command them myself…”

Jon had tried men before; he did not need a council of lords and guildmasters and smallfolk to do it. He did not need to make it last a hundred days. He did not need to copy the Southron trials.

Jon could not be the only one grown tired with Daenerys’ farce of a trial; it seemed an ugly wound to those that had been hurt to drag their justice out and out. 

“...we held Hollow Hill for three month, then left it to Ser Marbrand’s men…”

They seemed almost a way for the new lords to prove their loyalty, to disavow the Lannister rule, than to give justice to the many victims that the Lannisters had left behind. Another ugly ostentatious decoration for the South, another bauble for them to pass about and coo over, _Aren’t we so different now? Aren’t we so wise and better than we were before?_

“...orders were to burn the fields from Hollow Hill to Pinkmaiden. We set to torch the first dozen lots but there was a woman at the next, who wouldn’t yield to us…”

Jon had seen his share of Southron lords. He’d walked among the people of their armies, peoples great and small, when those armies had amassed in the North. He could not say he liked those lords, whose honor ran only to the other highborn men and whose justice was a sword that ever fell downward, long after it should have been turned above.

There were rumors that the Southron trials were just another mummery, a screen of smoke for the Good Queen to root through the disease and rot she had surrounded herself with. Jon didn’t know if that was true, or only the hopeful thoughts that she fed her poor alongside the rye bread and dried meat.

“...advance on the ruby ford with the greater forces, but the smallfolk near Raventree Hall would not supply us, so we needed take from them by force…”

He didn’t know if Daenerys had intended it that way or not. A dragon knew more about trickery than a wolf.

“...was in the forces that took and held Harrenhal. Lord Tywin gave us orders on how we need hold the castle, and I cannot say a single man didn’t follow them. I did, Your Grace, and lived to…”

He thought the Lannister found it a relief, that there was only the room and their voices as they spoke to each other. They spoke for a long while, the Lannister answering his questions and accounting for himself during the war. 

His words might make a lesser man ill. Jon had seen the results of war; he’d seen the carnage that the fighting wrought, and onto those heads that least deserved it. But he hadn’t been with Robb in the Riverlands. He hadn’t seen such great a scale to the fighting as the Lannister man described.

It made the deep frustrated ache of horror worse, that the man was of such little importance. He _was_ a lesser Lannister, in name and in place and in the grand plot of things. Jon thought that more and more the truth, the longer the man spoke. There were things he hadn’t seen, mattering so little as he did. Jon knew that there was, and the man’s position the only thing to spare him adding to the greater horrors.

But it didn’t matter how far apart the man’s branch had been from the trunk of that tree. The Lannisters treated ill their family, great and small alike. Tywin Lannister, who Robb had bested every time but for when it truly counted, carried the greatest of the blame. The whole diseased horde of the butcher’s work could rest on Tywin’s back, and a lesser load to each man he’d commanded, using his kin’s swords to direct the rivers of blood to where he liked them best. 

This man, this Lannister, confessed in tired hoarse tones that they had followed Tywin’s orders even after his death. “There was no one else to listen to, until the queen came,” he said and touched a hand to his throat. “Our forces were scattered, a dozen different factions of men trying to take control of us, and we could think of nothing else to do but follow blindly. I regret it, though, Your Grace. It was a good moment when Queen Daenerys came. She saved my life, riding through the Riverlands when she did.”

“She spared many men,” Jon agreed. 

The man looked away again. He nodded. “I had hoped,” he said after a moment, “almost that I would die in the North. I was, I am a coward, Your Grace. I was near the red woman when I fought. She commanded three men to burning when the sun set that last time.”

His voice slipped, choking tighter. “We could hear them screaming. I could smell them.” And then in the quietest whisper, so shameful that it struck at Jon’s heart, “And we were starving. The scent of it made me so hungry…”

The whole room was silent. The red witch had not lived long after that, Jon remembered. No, she had died later by some unnamed hand, not then. Not when she thrived under Stannis’ protection. Not after Stannis’ death. Not after she had tried to burn Gilly’s babe and only Val’s spear and Val’s fury had stopped her.

He had not been the one to kill her, nor could he name the man who did. Jon had not ordered the red witch’s death or seen to it himself. No, not even after. Love was the death of duty in him; Melisandre had seen Alys Karstark in the flames. Jon could not let go of the small hope that she might yet see Arya.

Someday, Jon realized, he would have to tell her. He would have to look at Arya’s sweet understanding face and see if she could forgive him even this, letting evil grow and coil and bloom in her name, all for his own cowardice, all for fear that the gods would not follow through their word.

The Lannister man seemed to shrink, the more the words poured out of him. Now his face was almost slack, his eyes turned down and tired, his mouth a-tremble. His cup had run dry, of what he had seen and heard and done.

“That is all, Your Grace,” he said. “The end of the fighting, you know yourself. I was near Last Hearth when the blows were struck and remained there until the sun rose again and the Unsullied turned us to march south.”

“And when she flew over Last Hearth,” Alys said to the man quietly, musingly, “she let her beasts flame, as signal all was well.”

“Aye,” the man said and rubbed again at his eyes.

Her face had a queer look, some emotion in her damp eyes that Jon couldn’t name. “That is why you left?” Alys pressed. “You wished to die, yet fled your justice. For what, for fear of the flames?”

“I am a coward, my lady,” the Lannister agreed. His cheeks were damp and he wiped at them once with a shaking hand. “I will not claim it drove me to madness. I will not even claim that I do not deserve it. But when the others made to leave, I could not make myself stay chained as I knew I should.”

“We thought to go to Skagos,” the man went on. “The rumor in court is they hold no law there. But when we wrecked so far north of the Vale, I did not think to go on further. I have killed many a man with my sword, in battle and elsewhere, and I know well that if the bearer of it has skill and the blade is sharp—” 

His breath shuddered. His mouth trembled. “It is over quickly,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I thought— Even if they call us cowards and ratmen and oathbreakers and hang us for that, hanging is not fire.”

He touched the thick scars on his neck again and nodded to himself. Now he looked less like he would weep, Jon thought. He could see, for a moment, the soldier the man must have been as his face washed with resolve.

Jon could not like the man, but he could not condemn him. Jon knew by touch the feel of dragonfire, and it was queer magic alone, unknowingly bequeathed to Jon, that had saved him the burning of it. “My eye is good,” he said, “and my sword is Valyrian steel. There is none sharper.”

Again, the wash of relief across the man’s face. The chasing, horrid look of almost-adoration. It discomforted Jon; he looked to the scribe, who sat grey-faced but ready to write the final lines.

As he turned back, for a moment, he caught the eye of the archer, her face flat and dull and empty as a drained cup. She looked at him a long moment, her face so blank she might have been a carving mounted on the wall.

But her eyes were burning so hotly that they might have set Jon aflame with a look. He made himself turn from her, soothed himself with the thought that he could ask her later what caused her furious look. He didn’t doubt that she’d tell him, and mayhaps with more detail than he’d want.

“The others,” Jon prompted the Lannister. “What can you tell us about them? Three are dead, one with a bastard sword, one with a rusted longsword, and one who called both those men friend.”

“Melwyn, Lambert, and Denys,” the Lannister said. “It was them that found a way to break the shackles they had on us. They took their weapons from those left near the rocks, discards from the Mummer’s Battle. Them and Rollam. Is he dead too, Your Grace?” and his voice cracked at the word _dead_.

Across the room, candlelight putting a glitter in her eyes, the archer leaned forward almost a hair’s breadth.

“No,” Jon said. His heartbeat came a little faster. “But we will find him soon enough. Tell me of him, since it seems that the news disquiets you so.”

The Lannister did look disturbed, his grey face paling and his hands shaking a little in his lap. “Only that you haven’t killed him yet, Your Grace,” he said. “The others were like me, cowards and men. That’s all. But Rollam’s different. Rollam Broadhill, and they all say he’s thrown off the old Lord Clegane, that his father earned the half-bastard name. Rollam isn’t as big as the Mountain or the Hound, if he is kin of them, but his sword-work is just as ugly and he is—”

The archer was still as a rabbit in the grass. She looked at Jon and he looked at her, both of them barely breathing for the want of the hunt and the worthier prey laid just then upon them, as the Lannister said, “He’s no lord or knight. We called him ser, but not one of us meant it. After the real war, when the queen’s men came for him, it took ten to put him back in chains and he hasn’t been quiet about it since.”

“He says the old queen liked him,” the Lannister said. He turned his eyes to his lap, his hands shaking. “Queen Cersei. If she did, it only made him worse. Now that he is cornered, I do not know what he will do.”

The scribe made note of it. “And the other?” Jon asked. The Lannister faltered and Jon pressed, “There were six bowls.”

“I don’t know his name,” the Lannister said. “Or what his crimes were. He did not even seem to know what was going on.” He looked up. “I could not leave him,” the Lannister said. “Will you— when you find him, I beg you, be gentle. He did not understand and I could not leave him there to it.”

“If he comes in peace,” Jon said, “it will be quick. On my honor.”

He could not look at the man’s face after he said it. Those weary blue eyes, full of stunned adoration, made him want to be ill across the man’s feet. He had no need to look at Jon in such a way, when all Jon did was as a lord ought. 

Was it not the right way, Jon thought, to be quick and merciful with the sword? It was Eddard Stark’s way. He soothed himself with that, that his true father would approve.

They were done now, the scribe inking out lines for the names to be signed and the Thenn guard relaxing his hold on the man’s shoulder. The rest could be left to Davos, Jon thought, who knew just as well as Jon how to continue.

“Is there anything else you wish to say?” Davos asked as Jon stood. “Name you any family to have your bones returned to? An heir who should hear of it, that he knows now is time to press his claim?”

The man answered, but Jon did not listen. He went around the table and stooped low to Alys’ ear, his hand gentle on her arm. Sigorn was watching the Lannister still; he paid them no attention as Jon asked her, “Is it enough? Are you satisfied?”

Her eyes were a little damp but her brows were drawn and her mouth a thin white line in her face. “If a Northman,” she asked, “had done those things—”

She didn’t mean the warring. She meant the fields, and the smallfolk, and Harrenhal. Jon was a little glad he hadn’t eaten since the noon; his stomach churned at the thought that one of his own people might do such things.

“He would not be sitting here if he was a Northman,” Jon said. “Because any Northron lord that would have asked of him those things is dead now. They died with the Boltons, at the edge of my sword.”

“It wasn’t right,” Alys said, just at the edge of a furious unhappy sob. The tears spilled down her cheeks, a silvery fall, and fell to darken her dress. “I saw a little,” she said and reached for Jon’s hands. He crouched and let her take them.

“I saw a little,” she said again, her breath hiccuping. “My uncle was such a lord as that. The one I spoke on, who would have seen me wedded for my claim. When we came home, Sigorn and I—”

Her breath caught, and her face was dull with the remembered agony. It hurt Jon to see her so; it hurt him to think that if he had been a little harder towards her, a little darker in his thinking when she came, that she might not have escaped it. “You needn’t speak on it,” Jon soothed. “Not if it distresses you so.”

But she shook her head and pressed on. “The smallfolk suffered,” Alys said. “Aye, Arnolf and my cousin Cregan had their satisfaction from them, and never mind the cost! My people paid it in their own flesh and blood! When Sigorn took Karhold, he put them to the sword. He spiked their heads atop my gate and I was glad to see it.”

“Any lord who would do such things,” Jon said to her, “any soldier or man, is one who deserves the sword. I am glad of it, too, that they saw their justice.”

“It’s good to give it to them,” Alys said. “It was the way my father—” and she swallowed hard.

“They had their justice, and so will he,” Alys said, a little distantly. She looked past Jon, to the Lannister, who was now signing his name to the scribe’s copywork. “Will he not? He’ll see his justice in my halls the same as they did.” 

She made motion to Sigorn, who was quick to attend her, his face painfully tender as he helped her up and wiped gently at her wet face.

“Davos,” Alys said as Davos put his own mark to the paper. He set aside the pen, looking at her. The candles flared and made her eyes very blue, but Jon thought if she but stood closer to the window, the thinnest bit of moonlight that fell might silver them again. 

Alys breathed in, once and steady. Her mouth didn’t tremble, though her cheeks were wetter now, her eyes spilling over with every blink. She said, “I think it time. The night passes us by. Finish that business,” and her head was proud, her eyes flashing as she said, “then fetch the king a block.”

She quit the room on Sigorn’s arm, tall and proud and steady, her hand resting still on the round of her belly. Jon paused a moment to give Davos a nod, but could not risk a look at the serving woman, not when Davos studied Jon’s face so thoroughly before he nodded back.

Outside, the night air was cool upon Jon’s face. He put his hand to Ghost’s back and breathed in the distant scent of the flowers for a long while, until his heart stopped aching so much and clenched a little less painfully with each beat. 

He was not the only one out in the air; people came from the Great Hall, men down from the battlements, women from the kitchens who paused to wipe their hands on their aprons as they went. It was a small solemn crowd that got larger the closer Jon went to the butcher’s yard.

He couldn’t mistake it for what it was, even as the people streamed in close, eyes wide and glittering in the torchlight, all of them trailing after Alys and Sigorn. There were no children among the crowd, though a handful of green boys and girls, just at the cusp of being grown.

Word had spread, and the people of Karhold had come to see justice done.

A low murmur rose from the crowds as the Lannister was led out behind Jon. But there was no vulgar cheering, or eager cries for blood. The night held all of them, and they were all made small and somber and insignificant under the blanket of darkness and stars above.

It felt like standing in a godswood, Jon thought, as he took his place. It felt holy, almost. But a Northron holiness, a holiness for the old gods. It rested heavy on his brow and his shoulders.

The Thenns took the man out to the butcher’s yard, the paving stones worn smooth from use, and the gutters still slick with the evening’s wash. The man did not fight it, or try and buck the hands on his arms, the hands that made him kneel and put his cheek to the wood. His eyes were not dead and they were not wild.

Alys did not make to leave, only stood with her husband’s arm around her and watched. Behind her ranged a gathering crowd of the men who’d found the Lannister, those Starks and Karstarks and Thenns, and none of _them_ laughing and chattering either, only watching the goings-on with dark eyes.

Once, so long ago, Jon had cautioned Bran when he was just a little boy on his pony and Jon a green boy on his horse, that Bran need keep a watch or else their lord father would know. Alys needed no caution. She needed no words. Jon was right about the moonlight; standing in it, she had the cool grey eyes of a Stark.

They had been wolves once too. And if even just one wolf was left alive, it could build itself a pack. If all the wolves did not die, then the wolves would come again.

“In my own name,” Jon said as he freed Longclaw from his scabbard, “as Jon of the House Stark, King in the North and Protector of this Realm, I sentence you to die.”

The steel caught the torchlight, the moonlight. Ghost shifted at his side. “Have you any last words?” Jon asked down at the man, with his moony lover’s look that made Jon ill.

“It is a relief,” he rasped. “It is a relief. I should have died before.”

A relief for him, aye. But Jon felt as if a world’s worth of eyes were watching him, many eyes peering out from the dark: living eyes and dead; his father’s grey eyes; his brothers’ Tully blue eyes; his forefathers’ eyes, grey and violet both; a thousand eyes beyond those of Alys’ people and so many of them with the cool Stark look. Mayhaps even the stars themselves peered down, or the thin and dying moon.

And red eyes. He felt the heavy weight of those watching red eyes. Ghost sat at Jon’s heel, his face tipped toward Jon’s own. His eyes were not ruby and blood-glitter now, but the bleeding red eyes of the weirwood heart trees. 

He could not leave the man alive. Jon did not even _want_ to. But he felt, curled as dark as a shadow in his heart, that he was doing another’s work swinging his sword when he should have been doing his own.

Jon drew Longclaw back. There was a brief moment’s resistance in his arm that faded with a sharp sting. “Your Grace,” the man said from below, his voice firm and strong and almost young, “Be careful. Be careful of Broadhill. His blood made him mad as his father’s dogs and the war made him worse.”

Tyland Lannister had not fought. He had not tried to buck the sentence laying claim to his neck. Now, from his position at the block with his cheek to the rough wood, he turned his damp blue eyes to Jon and softly but calmly gave caution to his killer.

The crowd murmured to each other as faintly as the rustle of leaves in wind, jostled each other slowly, looked on.

“Honorable words,” Jon said and gave Tyland a nod. He wondered if the archer was there, above or hidden in the shadows of the walls. He wondered if she would look away. And then he brought the sword down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, after three grueling weeks of editing this bastard, I'm done! Huzzah! Please excuse me while I blow a kazoo for a moment to celebrate!
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's kudos'd, commented, and subscribed so far. Your enthusiasm for this work is really such amazing support to me as I try (and fail, and try again) to wrangle the last half of the story into something equally as good as the first. I love all of you so much!!! 
> 
> Next chapter should be up on 7/16 as normal, and it'll be a little shorter, seeing as it's just the conclusion of Part Four. My pre-reader helpfully pointed out that 20k chapters barely squeak the lines of acceptable, but 30k is definitely too much for one sitting, so I did a little amputation!
> 
> As always, please feel free to come talk to me here, at my email (ao3throwaway27@gmail.com), or at my tumblr (mysticalmuddle.tumblr.com). I love, love, love hearing what you think! <3333333
> 
> **Edit 8/2: Feeling a lot better! Thank you so much on the kind wishes; holding onto my comments until the next chapter is ready; it makes me smile to see them in my inbox! Love to you all, and thank you for being so patient!!! <3333**


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Discussion and allusion to canon-typical war crimes**

###  Chapter Four Continued: ...Old Grudges

THEY none of them felt like gathering after that. The air smelled thickly of blood as Jon set Longclaw aside, and the lichyard men were already at their work, gathering up the head and body and spilling water over the wet sprays of blood.

“We’ll send for silent sisters from White Harbor,” Jon said in an undertone to Alys. She was sniffling and wiping at her eyes, but nodded resolutely. “They’ll see him to rest again in his home.”

Her voice was thick with barely held tears. “I’ll write to them myself,” she croaked and a sob burst out at the end of it.

Alys was not the only one crying; several of the other women in attendance had tears in their eyes, or wet faces, as they departed from the butcher’s yard. But she _was_ the only one to say, furious as she cradled her belly in both hands, “Damn this babe!” between hiccuping breaths.

Sigorn put his arm about her shoulders and she swayed to press her forehead to his chest. “Tomorrow,” Sigorn said to Jon, a promise with teeth in it, before he steered Alys away. 

“Aye,” Jon agreed. Broadhill, if he was so dangerous as that, couldn’t be allowed to live. He and Sigorn need be quick to find him, quicker than the archer. And once they did, they wouldn’t tarry. They’d end it there and then.

They left, Alys leaning heavily against Sigorn’s side, and Jon stole a moment for himself, just a fast pass of his eyes over the other people making to leave. But either the archer had changed her face and dress, or she wasn’t there among them.

He stopped his looking when Davos returned from his conversation with the lichyard men. Jon thought the man might say something, but Davos paused in his own leaving only long enough to clap his hand to Jon’s shoulder.

His face, familiar in the dark and the cool air, held that same new look when he met Jon’s eye. Not fear, not a sentence of madness to lay on Jon’s shoulders, but something else. Davos did not say anything, but his mouth turned up at the corner. Jon gave him a nod as they parted ways and Davos returned it thoughtfully.

Soon enough Jon was alone in the yard, the night air sweet on his face and Longclaw still spilling that last clinging bead of rubies to the stones. He took the sword in hand again, sacrificed his breeches to wipe the worst of the blood off, then paused.

The hall would be loud, hot with the fires and crowded with those same men, those guards who had stood witness. They, at least, were cheerful. For some it was as simple as this: any Lannister deserved to die. Jon could go and sit and jape with them and pretend to be easy at it, hidden among the Thenns and the Karstarks. 

The moon, thin and reedy now, was well up. Its silvery light fell on Ghost and changed him in an instant, turning flesh and blood to moonstone and opal and weirwood. Ghost, who was snuffling about the bloody stone gutters as if he wasn’t carved from precious stone. He raised his head for just a moment to look at Jon, and his wise red eyes seemed to say, _Why do we linger long here, Your Grace? You know this is not the proper way of things._

Ghost was right. The night air was cool and still, the world thoughtful as it laid itself to bed. The hall would be no relief. Jon turned from the door of the hall, took a lantern, and went first to the armory and then to the godswood.

He remembered this, another thing his true father had taught him, in motion and ritual and thought. Jon remembered it as he shrugged out of his tabard and undid the steel breastplate he wore underneath. He took off the vambraces and greaves and the swordbelt, undoing the trappings of a king. And with them fell away the heavy holy weight on his brow and shoulders, the crown invisible and the mantle obscure. 

Those red leaves like hands rustled above him in the loose sea breeze, Ghost slipped away to investigate the wood, and with him gone, with the armor and sigil of his house all fallen away, Jon was only a man again in the night air.

He sat slowly, in the light of the lantern, sat among the thick roots of the weeping heart tree and cleaned his sword.

The scent of the leather and the oil hung in the air and filled each of his breaths. It mixed with the deep rot of the fallen leaves, the damp earth, the moss, the rich scent of the weirwood sap, until it was as familiar as the scent of Ghost’s musky fur or Jon’s own sweat. 

That strange perfume, woods and work and holy wonder, was the scent of his boyhood, the slow drowsy moments as the heat of the pool cocooned them from the cold, when the day was over and Jon could steal a little of his father’s time for himself. 

It used to be a comfort to sit with Eddard when he cared for Ice, both of he and Jon with their long somber faces and the deep silence between them that need not be breached to understand each other. Jon used to hand him the leather scraps and when Ice was clean, his father might look at him and touch his rough heavy hand to Jon’s head, as if to say, _You are just like me. The rest of it does not matter, because you are like me and I am proud of it._

Never had he been more close to the man. Never had Jon felt more sure of his place in the world.

The godswood was the one place in Winterfell that Jon had never felt unwelcome. The godswood, and wherever Arya had been.

It was easy to put her there with him in the godswood if he shut his eyes and pretended a moment. Her ghost came to him in the orchard with laughter and smiles and stunned awe of the blossoming trees, but she came here to the godswood silent and solemn and slow in her steps, careful in her motions.

Arya hadn’t cared to follow her lady mother to pray in the sept. She’d belonged to the old gods just as much as Eddard Stark had. She belonged to the old gods just as much as Jon did.

When he opened his eyes again, he half-expected to see her there, keeping him silent company, knees tucked to her chest and her lip between her teeth, looking up at the heart tree’s face with wary eyes.

But she wasn’t. The blow was expected; he braced himself against it and took the weight of the strike well. Arya could no more be there than Jon could sprout wings and fly to her side. It was just a dream, same as before, same as always. A green boy’s dream for things that he missed. Shadow filtered down between the slivers of moonlight and the weirwood leaves sang gently in the wind.

His hands had stilled. Jon ran the leather down Longclaw’s length one last time and reached out for the scabbard, to set the blade safely away.

And as he did, he felt the pull, a dull momentary ache that eased with a sharp hot sting, high on his arm. His fingers, when he wrapped his hand about the scabbard, slid on the leather as if the scabbard was wet. But t’was his hand that kept the slick sticky feeling as he set the scabbard aside near where Longclaw lay, and he turned his palm to better see in the lantern light.

Blood ran down across his arm and wrist and fingers, blood soaked into the linen sleeve of his shirt. The cut, Jon remembered, that he had gotten on the cliff head. He must have torn the stitching, swinging his sword above his head to kill the Lannister.

Even the Spring was not free of blood. Jon wiped his hand across his breeches and put his sword away. Some of his blood had fallen onto the weirwood roots. It was still dripping down his arm, cooling in the air, drying on his skin in a way that he couldn’t ignore now that he knew of it. 

Ghost was done with his circuit of the trees. He came back to Jon, his tail a flag in the air, and threw himself down onto the leaf litter. “You did well, wolf,” Jon said as Ghost stretched and yawned. “Distracting them as you did, with hardly a look from me.”

Those wise red eyes squinted with the force of the yawn. And then they relaxed and seemed to say, _Think nothing of it, Your Grace. Is that not what friends are for?_

Ghost was not his friend. He was a part of Jon, woven between his own muscle and bone and sinew. “Aye, wolf,” he said. “Would that the rest was as easy as that.”

He reached out and touched Ghost’s head, watching as his fingers left a smear of blood across the curve of Ghost’s skull. A holy mark for a holy rite, Jon thought tiredly. The late hours, the early day, all of it was dogging at his heels; the world grew blurry, the world swam more the longer he rested there.

The night air was cool and easy. Jon leaned his head back against the weirwood’s trunk and shut his eyes. That green boy’s Winterfell was lost to him even when he dreamed, Jon felt. He couldn’t forget that he was in Karhold now any more than he could ignore the blood slipping down his arm.

He wanted his father but that ghost was harder to conjure. Arya’s phantom came to Jon easily, but Eddard Stark stayed as distant in his death, as inscrutable, as he had been those last few years of Jon’s life, those years that Jon had grown into a man and found that his father couldn’t look at him without pain or shame.

He’d thought it was a sign of his bastardy, a mark against his father’s honor, but Jon knew better now. It was grief for his mother in Eddard’s face, and fear for her son. And too, Jon thought now as a man grown himself, the heavy weight of the knowledge, that the past was ruptured and far gone, that the good things it held seemed to escape his reach for ever.

The past ran through a man’s fingers like river-water past a fisher’s legs. Eddard couldn’t catch it up, and Jon couldn’t either. Not even the gods could command a river to turn and rush the other way. It was gone and lost from all of them a single heartbeat’s measure at a time.

They none of them could put the past together again; Longclaw, safely sheathed, would be the sword Jon carried for the rest of his days, the sword his own children would watch him clean in the quiet rumination of the godswood.

Ice was still split in two, one half hanging in Jon’s chambers. Widow’s Wail, and just thinking the name made Jon’s mouth into a sneer. His child would carry the sword someday, Stark blood and Stark steel, and give it a better name than that.

The other half, Oathkeeper, remained with Lady Brienne and would stay in her hands so long as the chair that stood by Jon’s remained empty. Lady Brienne had not asked to retain it, and in fact had offered her return of the sword just after the war, but Jon wanted some sign between them still that the woman held her oaths to House Stark.

She was still his agent, never mind that she hadn’t hailed from the North. She was the honorable eye towards the Southron crown’s intentions, and perhaps the only person so dedicated as Jon in her own search for Arya. 

He wanted, badly, for Brienne to someday return to the North, to lay the sword where it belonged at Arya’s feet, and see Arya in her rightful place again. 

Arya, who’d taken her own little sword from Jon’s eager hand. A bravo’s slender blade, sharp at the point but still a toy, still made for a child’s hand. He had not shown her how to clean it, had not told her how to care for her steel. He hadn’t thought she would ever need know.

If Jon had known what would come to pass, that day he pressed Needle into her hands, he would have armed Arya better. He would have armored her; he would have spirited her away somewhere that she might grow up in safety instead of letting her be snatched away from his hands.

That little sword was all she had to protect herself from Lannisters, from men like the one Jon had killed that very night.

In the godswood, wanting her ghost, he couldn’t escape the past hour’s business. He couldn’t stop thinking of the long and gory confession. Of the blood on the paving stones and how slickly it ran into the gutter.

Of Arya when last he saw her, such a clever little thing but still small and skinny and very young.

He hoped that she had it still, Needle. He hoped she had never known cause to use it, but Jon thought it likely that she had. _Stick them with the pointy end_ , and with Nymeria lost to her, without the gods’ own creature protecting her, the child’s toy was all she had left to guard herself. Just that little sword Jon had given her, not meant as a good strong weapon but only a way to make her smile.

It was the last smile he’d had from her, and he couldn’t forget how widely she had grinned and how sweetly she had laughed as she showered his face with kisses. The memory of it, and of the blood, turned his hand to a fist.

Ghost must have felt it, the dark thoughts gathering and curling in Jon’s mind, or else scented in the air the heavy cloak of rage Jon could not set aside. He crawled across the ground, disturbing the scattering of leaves and pine-needle and moss, to lay his blocky head on Jon’s thigh and bump Jon’s clenched tight hand with his wet nose.

Jon made his fingers relax. He put them to petting the soft fur behind Ghost’s ears, and both of them eased with the touch.

Ghost had saved Jon’s life too many times to count. Ghost was the only reason Jon was a man now, and not just another dead wight. He owed his whole life to Ghost, Jon thought, and not just from the warging. Not just from sheltering Jon with his body, while Jon lived those three days in that strange queer space between his own death and the awakening that followed.

No, it was not just the warging that had made them close.

The gods had sent those direwolf pups, one to match each childling Stark, and it was man’s own folly that had seen Arya parted from hers when she needed Nymeria the most.

He didn’t know if Arya had the wolf dreams before Nymeria was lost to her. The old gods had sent those direwolf pups, one to match with each Stark, and he didn’t truly think there was a place that the old gods could not reach. Anywhere that water ran, that trees grew, that stone sat heavy and unimpeachable, that was a place where the gods stood strong.

But it had been months before Jon began to dream as Ghost, and longer still before he could warg Ghost with any confidence. Ghost was a part of Jon, since the very moment he’d pulled the direwolf from the melting patches of snow, but Jon and Ghost had not truly understood each other, not all the way, until Jon had died and lived inside Ghost’s skin, and been born again.

It had taken time for him and Ghost to knit so tightly to each other, and time was what Arya and Nymeria had never had.

The old gods could reach far, but how far could a new warg reach? An untrained warg, separated too soon from her wolf?

Above him, the leaves whispered and muttered to themselves. Fragrance fell across his face as the wind put its hands to his cheeks and hair. The world seemed to speak of things he couldn’t hear; it sang of Spring in a language he didn’t speak.

Man and magic had ruined the world and now the gods were building it anew.

Only once had Jon heard the old gods speak; if the weirwood tree had aught to say now, he could not understand it. 

He peeled his eyes open again, heavy sandy weight, and looked down at the head laid across his lap. “Can you hear them speaking?” he asked Ghost. “Do they bring news of your sister, to ease your heart?”

The memory of wolves was longer than the memory of man. Ghost looked up at him with those wise red eyes. _You might know, Your Grace,_ they seemed to say, _if you learned to listen._

And then the wolf lay his head back down, and shut his eyes, and gave the deep satisfied breath that he always made after he had curled up onto his rug and just before he had fallen asleep.

Ghost missed Nymeria. He longed for her, for his pack; Jon hadn’t forgotten the shattering noise that had come from his own throat when he’d stood with Alys and Sigorn and the wolf on the battlements.

Ghost was not the only one who longed for Nymeria. Jon felt certain if he could but look again into her gleaming yellow eyes, he would know if Arya lived there within her, dreamed there within her, fought the War for the Dawn from within her.

The old gods could reach far. Nymeria had come north with her pack of man-eaters during the war, all those lesser wolves thick with fur and muscle and fearlessness. To watch them run between the trees was like watching water pour past stones; to watch them fight the dead was like watching ice as it frozen and broke unseasoned wood. T’was the first time Jon had felt comforted, rather than afraid. Nymeria had helped to carry the battle. Her wolves had saved so many men. Might be t’was the gods that brought her north again, Jon thought, but might be it was _Arya_ instead.

Above him, the wind whipped the leaves of the weirwood tree from whisper to whine. Jon shut his eyes again. _I pray you gods_ , he thought, but couldn’t find the words to finish it.

What did it matter if he prayed? If he kept to his faith? If he tried to balance that knife’s edge between what the gods asked of him and what his people demanded and what Jon’s own blackened heart yearned for?

The gods had not given him what he wanted. 

The night was cool and easy despite Jon’s disquieted thoughts. He stroked Ghost’s head and heaved a sigh at just the same time as the Ghost did, a sigh dug deep from inside their bodies.

He’d rest a moment, before seeing to his sword and his armor and his arm. Just a second’s rest with that strange and familiar scent slipping into his lungs. The trees sang, and Ghost was warm upon his leg, and Arya’s ghost was with him, close enough to touch.

The wind sang and the trees spoke in their dry rattles and another ghost slipped tall and lean and graceful from the trees, red and blue and black and white, smiling and saying something cheerfully to Jon, patiently, and a hand like pale leaves laid itself upon a pale grey head, and he—

Woke up with a fierce, pained grunt, shoving with half-panicked instinct to where Ghost stood with a paw on Jon’s stomach, knocking all the air out of Jon’s chest. “Off,” he wheezed, heaving at Ghost’s shoulder and Ghost went with a jolt.

But not, Jon saw, his eyes still sticky with the unexpected sleep, because of Jon’s order. The archer was standing there, not too far, frowning down at Ghost, though her face smoothed to blankness again when she saw Jon watching her.

“Hush,” she told the wolf and turned his face aside when he tried to lick at her hands, fingers at his jaw as if she were unafraid of his teeth. And then softly, as if still speaking to Ghost, she said, “If I’d known you were sleeping, I would not have come.”

“You would have,” Jon said and the words fell out of his mouth before he could stop them. He sat up further. His arm ached. His beat too quickly and for the space of a single solid thud, Jon would’ve sworn there was someone else with them. 

But the godswood was empty but for three, man and wolf and woman. Jon ground his palms over his eyes, trying to keep the memory of the dream with him, but it only slipped away faster. 

“You would have,” he muttered again, but more quietly, feeling the words solid and true on his tongue.

When he looked up at the archer, at her face in the dim lantern light, her eyes were flat and dull as they had ever been. But she said distantly, “Yes,” and Jon could see that the word surprised her too as it fell out of her mouth.

They stared at each other for a long lingering span. The archer’s hands were empty; she was still dressed as a serving woman, though now her dirty apron was gone and a clean one had been tied in its place. 

Her hair was caught up now, neatly, and her face was placid and mild. If the execution had shocked her, or the sight of the blood lingered long for her too, she didn’t show. And why would she? Jon thought. Surely the archer had her share of the dead. Surely the archer, despite her fury in the receiving room, understood Jon’s work in a way that not even Alys and Sigorn could.

Her empty hands were busy; she pet at Ghost’s head until he was lolling and melting against her.

Someone had touched Ghost in his dream, Jon thought distantly. A grey hand upon a white head. Someone Ghost had liked just as much. He could not remember. Jon sometimes dreamed as a wolf; he wondered if Ghost sometimes dreamed as a man.

He couldn’t ask him; those red eyes were shut in bliss. The only crimson stare was that of the heart tree, looking down upon Jon and the archer both.

They three might have sat there forever, looking at each other; they might have been the only ones alive in the world. Drifting above the deep rich scent of the godswood was the scent the archer had brought in with herself, like the night wind brought in almond blossom scent, like the winter winds brought in the cold crisp scent of snow.

Finally she said, not looking at Jon, but at the carved face of the heart tree, “This one looks fierce. Might be I’d be afraid if you weren’t here as well.”

The face of the old gods scowled down at them, but the archer’s words lay as lightly as snow upon Jon’s shoulders. “You wouldn’t,” he said with a snort. “Whether I was with you or not.”

She looked at him then, a fast flick of her eyes, liquid black in the lantern light. “We’ll never know,” she said softly, “as you are with me now.” And the corner of her mouth rose, just a little, a curl that promised a smile. 

He wanted, badly, to see her smiling. Jon cast in his mind for something clever to say, a gentle tease to coax her face into it.

But he lost his chance, almost as soon as he realized that he had it. She was looking at him still, and her face went again to blankness as she said, “You’re bleeding, You Grace.”

He’d forgotten and hadn’t noticed, beyond a single thought to the soreness, when his startle awake had opened up the wound again. “It’s nothing,” he said and made to stand, wiping the wettest of the blood off his hand again. 

He put that same hand out a second later, to help keep his balance, and felt the rough surface of the weirwood root drive the splinter into his skin. Jon hissed low between his teeth and the archer jerked a step forward, Ghost falling aside from his sprawl at her legs.

His hand, when he jerked it back, throbbed with the sudden pain. Jon squinted down at it in the dim light, bloodsmear and dirt and the narrow piece of wood piercing him, as pale as a shard of ice.

Absurdly, he felt a pang of betrayal. The old gods had been hungry gods, Jon knew from his father’s teachings and the nursery stories of his childhood, but had he not quelled them? After Jon’s whole life, had he not fed them enough?

“He isn’t fierce so much as vengeful,” he quipped to the archer. “And now I am duly punished for sleeping when I ought to have prayed instead.”

She gave no response; her body was quiet as a whisper when he glanced up at her, and her eyes were again upon the heart tree’s face. “You cannot fight a tree as you can a man,” Jon told her, still feeling the absence of her smile.

“You cannot fight a god,” the archer said back, a low murmur that Jon needed strain to hear. He was the one with the wound, but in the shadows from the lantern, from the thin sliver of moonlight falling from above, he could believe for a moment that her face was the one that looked wounded.

The splinter itched, but he knew better than to dig for it in the dim light and expect that he’d get all of it out from under his skin. He reached for his swordbelt, rose fully to his feet, and fastened it about his waist.

He hadn’t forgotten that the archer was there, not truly. Her presence came creeping under his skin whenever she was near him, but in that handful of seconds he’d looked away, she’d come closer like a ghost across the ground. He jumped, startled, and turned when she pressed the cut on his arm.

“What—” Jon demanded, feeling the hot flash of pain, and then shut his mouth.

He was looking down at her bent head, the back of her neck where the scarf didn’t cover it. The delicate bones of her spine, soft hills under snow, drew his eye and held it as she pressed a wad of cloth to the wound and tied another piece of fabric about his arm to keep the make-shift bandage in place.

“Your maester should have seen better to this,” the archer said, her whole body stiff with disapproval, her neck a sweet arch as she tended his arm. “T’was poor work, for it to tear with such little movement.”

She gave the knot a final tug; Jon grit his teeth against it and kept gritting them when she stepped away. Those eyes flashed to his, both of them paused where they were. Jon’s heart crashed against his ribs and his hand was a fist, burning around the splinter, and he couldn’t make his fingers loose until the archer turned and stooped to pick up his armor.

He wouldn’t see her reduced to fetching and carrying. T’was one thing to see her play at being a servant, her eyes like hot coals upon the man she wished to kill, and another to see her, his ally almost, debase herself in such a way for him.

“Leave it,” Jon said, moving to do so himself, but she gave him a narrow look from those flat eyes, almost a glare. The strangeness of such an expression from her, such an expression turned on _him_ , when before he almost had her smiling, stilled his feet.

“You’re _bleeding_ ,” she said again. Was the concern in her voice for true? She wore her mask like her own armor; she changed her expression like the winter wind changed direction. He wanted it to be true, her disquiet over such a paltry wound, but Jon was not a man who got what he wanted. She had shot those men, had haunted Jon close as his own shadow to do so. Likely any damage to himself was unacceptable to her.

“Not so much that I cannot carry my things,” he tried, striving to be civil. His burned hand wanted to make a fist, the splinter itching furiously as he curled his fingers just a little. “Leave them. I can manage it myself.”

She looked at him from the corner of her eye, and that manufactured blankness slid back into place. “And what kind of servant would I be if I let m’lady’s cousin the king carry his own things?” she demanded. She scooped up the arm guards, face turned away as she made a basket for them from her apron.

Her ragged-hemmed apron, Jon thought. She’d torn it to see to his arm and was now resolutely stacking the rest of his armor in the curved bowl of it.

“An obedient one,” he said and was pleased to see that she couldn’t hide her grimace at that. No, Jon thought, the archer was good at many things, but not obedience.

“It would look odd,” he pressed. “A servant girl carrying my things, when I have never asked one to do so before.” 

And too, it rankled at him to see her cheapened to that, though he could imagine the look of disbelief if he gave that as the reason why. The archer might not care that she was a woman, if not a lady, but Jon couldn’t set it aside. Almost, she was his guest, and Jon had always prided himself on his fine manners. 

Her face was softly dull but not quite managing the placid smoothness she’d had before. “Perhaps if we’re seen, a watcher might come to the conclusion that the king, who’s injured his arm so much that it’s bled all across him, oughtn’t carry heavy things,” the archer said and raised her brows at him provokingly. 

She made no move to give her burdens up, and Jon’s dignity as a man wouldn’t let him scrabble with her for the pieces like he might have if Sigorn or Alys was the one being so irritating.

It was impossible to argue with her; she was as stubborn as an unwhipped mule. But Jon well knew, a man who might not bend might yet bargain. “It isn’t right, serving me as if you are beholden,” he said. “The chestplate, if nothing else. Give me that to carry.”

He added, unable to quell his smile, “Unless you would rather play squire as well as serving maid, and see me strapped back into my armor?”

She straightened, a hand supporting the bulge of her apron from below, and gave him a hoary look. “You’ll carry it with your off-hand,” she ordered with narrowed eyes, and at his amused snort, added a belated, “Your Grace.”

All that was left was the tabard and the plate. “As you say,” and he took them up with the lantern, then met the archer’s gaze and raised a brow. “It’s cloth,” he said as she turned her eyes to his hand. “And hardly taxing to me, to heft so heavy an item as a length of cloth.”

“The lantern—” she tried, frowning.

The handle of it caught and scratched at the splinter, working the skin of Jon’s palm to heated ache. “T’would be a fine jape for the wolf,” he said, “for both of us to be stumbling about in the dark and him the only one who can see.”

The corner of her mouth was fully tucked down now. “You shouldn’t,” she said, almost sulky. But there was no more protesting; Jon knew that he had won.

“And you should?” he teased. “A poor use for so skilled a set of hands.”

“Valar dohaeris,” the archer said woodenly, but those were some of the few High Valyrian words Jon knew. He could not imagine her parroting them with the same careless grace and belief as the Faceless Man who had treated with Jon during the war.

The archer, bold and sly and coming alive underneath her mask, did not seem the type to blindly follow direction. Not Jon’s, at least, and _he_ was the one that she had come to see; he could not imagine her yielding to the command of a man lesser than himself if she gave in to Jon only after great protest. For she did give in, as ill-willed as she was about it.

He made himself swallow down the smile, unable to help it at that look she gave him, her sulkiness towards him speaking clear that she knew he was laughing at her a little. “You are no man,” he reminded her, “And no servant, much less mine.”

Before her eyes had been as liquid pools in the lantern light. But now the press of her thin lips and the stiff jerk of her head made over her eyes to ice. But Jon was a Stark and Stark blood ran thick with ice; he only gave back a courtly motion that she should proceed him.

He felt like laughing, felt the laughter caught up safely in his throat. She didn’t blush or fumble, no maidenly expression crossed over her almost-blank face. But her sourness, the stiffening of her offended body, was just as sweet to him.

She was as proud as a peacock after that, sweeping ahead of him from the godswood and turning towards the stair. Jon could do naught but trail after her, Ghost first at his own heel and then darting ahead to walk beside the archer as she went.

“I see you need no direction,” Jon called to her as they climbed the darkened stairs. 

She scoffed, a faint, distant sound. Her feet were silent on the stone treads, the softest rasp of her skirts against each other like moth wings in the dark. She didn’t hesitate at the corner, only turned the right way. “How long have you been playing at some role here?” Jon asked, lengthening his stride to catch closer to her.

She was still irritated with him, saying with deep courtesy, “This keep is not so big, Your Grace. I have seen larger.”

The face she’d chosen, placid and plain, was young. But she could hide anything under her finely wrought mask. He said thoughtfully, “And what were you doing there, I wonder,” and had the pleasure of hearing her wroth little noise, tucked up still behind her teeth before it could escape.

A thought came to him, sudden and insidious. _Who were you haunting then?_ He wanted to ask. _What man were you playing servant to, seeking out, speaking to?_

Braced behind his teeth lurked the question, _Did he see your teeth behind your little mask as I did, or did he debase you and order you about as the servant you’re not?_

The rage was unworthy of him. He grit his teeth and soothed himself, that it was the thought of her being treated in so a degrading a way, and nothing else, that made him wroth with it.

They were at the door of his bedchamber now. Her eyes went to him, once, liquid and darkly luminous in the thin lantern light, the torchlight from the walls, before she opened the door and proceeded him in.

She wasn’t his servant, Jon thought as she walked before him into his own chambers as if the entire keep was at her disposal. But she’d done a servant’s work for him, between watching him execute the Lannister man and waking Jon in the godswood from his dreaming.

The room was aglow with candlelight, fresh tapers in their holders, the wicks burning neatly where a deft hand had trimmed them. A covered cloche at the little table, promised that Jon would have some dinner after all, and warm wash-water still steamed from the bowl that the archer had left by the ember-bright hearth.

“You did this,” he said, looking at how neatly she had ordered his room, his things, his evening. He felt certain it was her, and not some other chambermaid. 

“Valar dohaeris,” the archer said again as she went to the dressing table and piled his armor atop it. She paused, empty-handed, and Jon realized after a moment that she was waiting for the chestplate. He brought it to her, then stood close to her as she set it beside the other pieces.

“All men must serve,” Jon said back and resisted the urge to reach out and take her arm. He had touched her already before, the heat of her arms and her waist through the rough cloth of her dress; it would be so easy to reach out his hand, palm itching and blood-dried tight, and steal that touch again. It would linger, Jon thought, just as long as the first touch had, clinging to his fingertips and catching at his breath.

“Is that why you’re here?” he asked, and advanced a step, trapping her between himself and the table. The ugly thought clung to him, that _Jon_ himself might not matter. That the archer was simply retreading her own familiar role. 

He didn’t want to believe it, that her oddly sour, strangely solicitous manner was just her way with anyone. He wanted, badly, to believe that her motions towards him, passing beyond _seeing_ him, beyond any simple curiosity his name might evoke, weren’t habit. 

For her face to come alive under her mask whenever she looked at him, _that_ had to be something new, new and unwanted, unasked for as Jon’s own lingering thoughts on her. “Are you here for this?” he pressed. “To play as my squire and kingsguard and chambermaid and steward?”

She didn’t look at him, only stared past his shoulder to the room. He had no name for her, not one that he might call to command her attention, not even a title. The archer was not a lady, tearing her apron and bloodying her own hands with his injury, tracking mad Lannisters, shooting men dead when they threatened Jon.

She wasn’t his friend, that he might at least name her that.

“Is it?” he asked again and finally she met his look, eye to eye. 

T’was like she’d drawn shutters over a window to keep the light in. There was nothing there, nothing in those eyes like copper coins worn flat and dull and uninterested by many fingers.

“Your supper is getting cold, Your Grace,” she said instead of answer. “And I need attend to some business of my own.”

It felt like a sharp prim reprimand, the cool way she said it and her eyes so flat. With eyes like timeworn coins, she wasn’t seeing him any more than Jon was truly seeing her. He swallowed down his absurd disappointment, then backed away two steps and let her move further into the room.

“Then you may go,” he said back, trying to summon some coldness of his own. He bowed as he might to a lady, just to make her as wroth as he suddenly was, and it thrilled him to see her thin mouth tighten as she curtsied back. And then she was out the door without another word, and Ghost followed at her heels to the doorway, then sat in confusion and stared when she shut it behind herself.

 _He_ had dismissed _her_ , Jon soothed himself as he went to the little table and pulled away the cloche. His hand itched furiously, his own fingernails cutting into his palm. The splinter drove deeper with the tight fist he made, not a danger but a nagging unignorable irritation, and he might have attended that first, or at least washed his own blood off himself, but the scent of the food stirred him.

He _was_ hungry, ravenous. Some days after the sword swing, Jon wanted no food. He wasn’t the kind of man who gloried in bloodshed, no matter how necessary it had been. But now he sat at the table and ate his ill-begotten supper with good appetite. No, he was hungry, despite the irritation and the cold disappointment, the almost embarrassment at the archer’s final cool look.

Despite the near-edge of shame that filled him, like misstepping in a dance and crashing clumsily against his partner’s side.

Ghost removed himself from the doorway when he heard the scrape of Jon’s fork on the plate. Those red eyes didn’t glare at Jon, or beg for some supper of his own. And there were no words to the soft, plaintive look Ghost leveled at him, as if Jon himself could stir the archer up again from thin air and moonlight.

He threw Ghost a piece of meat and watched him pluck it from the air with a fierce flash of his teeth. “We had our chance at company,” Jon said. “Might be we’ll see her tomorrow, and you can make a fool of yourself then.”

He thought of the cold look the archer had given him, as Jon had cornered her near the table. “Mayhaps you’ll even be the only one,” he muttered.

Ghost made no response. He’d finished licking busily about his mouth, for any stray scrap or crumb, and now turned himself back to the door.

“We’ll both need tread more carefully,” Jon told him. “And no mistaking it; there’s danger here.”

And it wasn’t just the danger of chasing her off again. This, he felt certain in. The archer might not be a danger to them, but some warning still ticked and shrilled in the back of Jon’s mind, as ever-present as the itch of the wood in his palm, and just as impossible to ignore. 

When the door creaked open without a knock, he looked up unconcerned, expecting Alys or Sigorn, mayhaps even Davos. But Ghost was already pressing forward, his tail making cheerful arcs in the air, and the archer was rearing back gracefully on one foot to press the other to Ghost’s chest. She shoved him back, a firm gentle kick, and stepped forward into the room.

She could not use her hands to dissuade the wolf, Jon saw, because her arms were full of basin and cloth and flagon, and those things balanced atop a heavy metal box that she cradled as tenderly as a mother with child.

“Away,” she snapped at Ghost and Jon could not summon the surprise he should have that Ghost complied at once, his tail a furious pendulum as he retreated several steps, and then under the force of her unrelenting glare, took himself away to his hearthrug.

Jon made to stand and help her, setting his fork aside, but the archer leveled those eyes at him, eyes brilliant and luminous as they had been when he slammed her to the kitchen wall, and said sourly, “I didn’t bring you that dinner for it to get cold.”

And then, belatedly, as if hearing the rough words coming from her mouth a moment too late, she jerked her face to the side and muttered, “Your Grace.”

He should not feel delighted. He shouldn’t; she was nothing to him, a threat, failed business he need tidy away. Jon swallowed down the smile his mouth wanted to make, lowered himself slowly back to his chair, and tried to find something to say that was not so stupid as, _I did not think you meant to return._

He was spared speaking at all. He watched with his fork loose in his hand as she dumped her armful of peculiar things to the dressing table beside his armor and said, almost to herself, “Your lady cousin needs a new maester.”

Not, Jon noticed, _m’lady_. She had put aside her mask so thoroughly in her own irritation as she unstacked the flagon and set the cloth beside the basin, and only as she dropped a long needle to the tabletop with the thin chime of vibrating metal did he realize what she meant to do.

“Did you ensure that?” Jon asked. He didn’t know if he meant the question for true or not—she’d shot the Lannister, she’d been wroth over his arm, she could be anything, _anything_ under that ill-fitting docile mask she wore.

Her look to him then was droll, dry. It made his mouth want to smile more, absurdly, as she said, “I am not _armed_. I told you already.”

“I’ve seen the man,” Jon said back, his heart hammering. “And I’ve seen you. I don’t think you’d need much of a weapon.”

She snorted and turned away quickly before he could see what look that comment brought upon her face. If she was smiling, if she was struggling to hide a smile the same as Jon was. He wanted, badly, to know. The palm of his burnt hand, where the splinter was driven deep, itched so fiercely that it was almost a pain.

“Eat your supper,” the archer said after a moment, turning back to the table. “Unless it isn’t to your liking.”

“No,” and Jon was quick to say it. He didn’t want her to catch offense and leave again, and not just because the maester truly was shit at his job. “No, it suits me fine.”

He cleared the last bits from his plate, pushing aside the scraps of greens and the hard crust of the bread, as the archer took a key from the thin chain about her neck and opened the queer box, then selected from its shadowed contents a variety of vials and bottles.

She _was_ a Faceless Man; Jon couldn’t ignore it. “I hope you are not planning to poison me,” Jon said. He wasn’t teasing her, he told himself, only good knowledge and experience that drove him to say it. 

A man who spoke on his plans was a man more likely to unthinkingly reveal some critical part of it, some piece of the machinations that his enemy could use. The archer wasn’t his enemy, but as strange and sour and irritating as she was, use of hostile negotiation tactics could hardly tell Jon _less_.

“A fine worry,” the archer said dryly, as she poured vinegar from the flagon to a smaller bowl, and a sharp herbal scent rose from it. “Yet you ate your dinner all the same.”

“Perhaps,” Jon said slowly, studying the set of her shoulders and back, “I am coming to trust your intentions.”

“You shouldn’t,” she chided as she stepped back from her work. “I am a killer, Your Grace, and you cannot claim to know me.”

He wasn’t teasing her, but her voice, the set of her spine, so easy now in his presence. Might be that she was teasing him.

The itch of his palm was set to drive him mad. He put his off-hand to it and dug his thumb to the spot, feeling the splinter resting just under his skin. “And yet,” he said, not knowing what he meant by it, only letting it fall from his mouth.

Perhaps _she_ knew. Perhaps Faceless Men could pluck thoughts from a confused mind as easily as fruit off a heavy-laden tree. After a bare second, she agreed softly, “And yet.”

Something lingered in the air between them, invisible as blossom-scent and certain as the cool whisper of the wind outside the open window. It was not just him, Jon thought. No matter how she pretended to politeness and blank indifference behind her mask and her courtesy. This possibility between them was not just him.

Jon could not regret the shape of Arya, scab-kneed and tangle-haired and tender, that stood between them and made him turn his eyes away before the archer could meet them. There was _nothing_ about Arya that he could regret, save that she was still lost to him. 

Arya stood between them, and too, whatever caused the archer herself to press then pause, to linger then draw away, to tease and scold then turn to ice again. He couldn’t speak to it, be it ghost or duty or fought-off desire. But the thought— _it is not only me_ —soothed him.

He was tired of being alone in things.

The archer crossed the room as Jon pushed his dish away and laid before him the empty basin, the full bowl, the needle, and a length of silk threading. And then, hesitantly, she pulled from the sleeve of her dress a small knife and lay it beside the rest.

“For your shirt,” she said after a moment when Jon neither recoiled nor reached for his own dagger, still strapped at his waist. “T’is easier to cut it,” she added, “that you need not strain the wound with lifting before I sew it again.”

It was a relief that she would not ask him to peel off his shirt; the scars across his back and chest, protected only by the flimsy drapes of linen, were his. Aye, his and a little they were Arya’s and a little they were the gods’. 

The archer had no right to them. It felt like trespass, against his loyalty and her own modesty, for her to see them. She wasn’t a lady, not for true, just as she wasn’t his guest, but Jon felt the impropriety of it all the same. She was a stranger and a woman, one that he—

Her knife blade caught the light, as she shifted it impatiently where it lay upon the table.

No, t’was better that Jon keep his shirt. He turned a little in his chair, so she might reach his injured arm easier, and said, “In your own time.”

The little knife did not bother him any more than standing down line of her bow-sights had; if she wanted him dead, he would be dead seven times over. Jon had no hesitation in himself, but he felt the thin moment as she reached for the knife and took it up, then stood with her palm just above his shoulder, heat through the air, heat above his skin.

Jon was aware, distantly, that he was flushed with gooseflesh, the fine hairs of his neck and arms standing at attention.

The archer took in a deep breath, slow and measured, then another. Jon felt the recognition strike him, sudden and true. The master-at-arms who’d taught him to fight and shoot as a child—Ser Rodrik Cassel—had taught Jon much the same when Jon and Robb had first learned the bow. 

It should have been an ill thing, to trust a stranger-woman who needed calm her shaking hands before she tended to his arm. But Jon would not send her away for anything, as her hand finally landed as light as a brush of bird feathers to the ball of his shoulder and she took the knife to his sleeve.

He didn’t trust the maester himself, not with the way the stitching hadn’t held even a day. If it was during the war, the man would have been shouted out of the healing tents for wasting supplies; if it was during the war—

The sting came as the archer took away the makeshift bandage and the dried blood that sealed the wound came with it. Jon chewed the inside of his mouth to keep from hissing. He didn’t trust the maester, but he _wanted_ to trust the archer, and _she_ wanted, badly, to see her own hands set to rights the one wound the Lannisters had given him. 

She didn’t say it, her want for it, with her mouth or with some coy motion of her body. She wouldn’t say it; she hadn’t said it. He thought she might not be able to even ask. The archer tried yet to hoard her own thoughts to herself, in all but the moments she was wroth. But Jon knew it true all the same.

He said as she set aside her knife and turned to all the things laid upon the table, “I did not think that men so preoccupied with killing would learn the healing arts as well.”

Her hands did not pause as she put wet rag to wound. It gave another sudden sting, then a quick coolness to the whole of his upper arm. “My masters taught me many things,” the archer said mildly, retreating again without Jon’s eyes on her, without any force to keep her mask from slipping back into place.

He made then to turn his head and look, and she put her damp fingers to his cheek, his jaw, and with that light cool touch, kept him looking ahead. 

They both stilled. T’was the softest of pressure, a butterfly wing against his skin, a feather, a child’s chaste kiss. A blow hard and fast enough to dizzy his head, to break his neck. He could not breathe under the weight of those fingers. She’d piled a thousand stones upon his chest.

The archer’s breath caught. Jon closed his eyes, felt his teeth grow slick with the taste of blood.

And then she jerked her hand away and he swallowed the hoarse sound threatening to break free of his chest.

Silence wrapped them together tenderly. Jon was almost frightened to breach it; to speak would be to break something more precarious than glass, more precious than gold. 

Outside, the wind rose to a howl and Ghost lifted his head from his rug, scratched his claws across the wool as he stretched, and huffed air without conscious sound. The spell between them shattered with it; the archer returned the rag to the bowl with a wet bubble.

Jon licked at his dry lips as she said very stiffly, “Pardons,” and bent her head. She couldn’t have possibly meant the touch, meant anything with it, not with how sharply she’d exhaled as she tore her hand away.

He need be careful that he did not offend her or startle her away. Manners prompted him to excuse her. His jaw ached with a deep burn. She didn’t flee, but stood, faltered, as if waiting for him to speak.

Jon kept his eyes on the window, the night outside it, struggling to remember her earlier remarks, and prompted her slowly, “Such as what? Your fellows who came during the war had few words to spare. I learned little from them.”

It broke the stillness of her. The archer reached for him again and her hands worked carefully. She felt the edges of the wound, light pressure that didn’t pain him, and her low disgusted noise at what she found there was thoughtless. The touch to his face had been enough to slough her mask off again. She said, almost to herself, “I will take all of these out and begin again. The fool would see it putrefy, with stitching such as this.”

In the cool air, in the quiet, Jon felt more exposed than he ever had, more than even those moments when he was bared down to his skin. There was nothing to cover himself with; there was nothing he needed to cover. To turn himself away now would do something to the archer; he could no more risk the hurt to her than he could take up his dagger and sever his own burning itching hand.

He watched the shadow of her moving in the corner of her eye, darkness and the bright flickering washes of candlelight, and breathed in the scent of her body so close to his.

He need go carefully, and more than he had ever been before. She was twice as like to shy, or retreat into herself, and his jaw burned as he clenched it. He couldn’t bear it; it couldn’t be borne. 

Jon did not press her; he couldn’t bank that her strange sense of duty towards him would keep her there. He cast his mind for something else to speak on and was just opening his mouth as she said, “I learned many things in my time there. How to take a man apart, how to examine his insides, how to put him together. Magic, mathematics, poisons, politicking. Languages and lies. Healing, and far better than the Citadel teaches it.”

“Hold still,” the archer murmured to the skin of his shoulder, a warm puff of air as she leant in close. The knife was in her hand again and she took the thread from his arm carefully, cutting each stitch with a steady hand.

A tight pull, pain like flying embers, quick to quit themselves in the cool air. He felt far too aware of his body, of hers, of the points of contact between them as she took apart the wound on his arm.

He felt aware, too, of the knife. And the silence, as sharp as a knife between them as she worked, swallowing softly, breathed in and out in an unmeasured way.

“Courtesies,” the archer went on, when she was done, when she set the bloodied knife aside. “Kissing. How best to sow confusion in a great many different places. Comfort,” and her voice changed a little as she said, “Mercy, for any who wanted it.”

The cloth returned to his arm. She stroked it cool over the wet streaks of blood, and her empty hand touched the back of his neck, a second’s worth of fire on his skin, a moment’s warning in the soft touch before she dipped the cloth back in the bowl and then washed the wound itself. Jon braced himself against it, let the pain pass over him, and waited for her to speak again.

When she was silent for a long while, the cloth dripping as she wrung it and soaked it again, he chanced to say, “I didn’t think that an assassin need know so many different things. You must be as greatly schooled as a king.”

Her hands, pale phantom flickers at the edge of his vision, stilled. His heart crashed in his chest, his burnt hand itched, and Jon waited. But she said so softly that he nearly didn’t hear the humor in it, “Perhaps better schooled than you, Your Grace?”

“I don’t doubt it,” Jon said back, “though my lessons came from much less auspicious hands.”

“Though you were no less apt a pupil,” the archer murmured. “Same as I. Did it also earn you extra lessons? A greater weight of duty, as time passed and your teachers were more pleased?”

He thought of Lord Commander Mormont, with his steady belief in Jon, and of Sam as he counted the smooth tokens from the rough hands, and of the faces of those Northron lords, pale in their deep furred hoods, as they pledged their swords to him. “Aye,” he agreed. “Aye, same as you.”

It seemed to please her. She set aside the rag again and left him briefly to empty the bowl. He turned to watch her, the straight line of her back, the easy curve of her shoulders as she poured the bowl out the window, the graceful way she stepped over Ghost’s broad side as she returned.

And she made no move to stop him looking, only looked back, her eyes to his and something alive in them. Something yet living, yet burning, like embers that might be fanned better into flame.

“You were a favorite of your masters,” he guessed, as she set to work filling the bowl again. Another set of powders and tinctures, more vinegar, a different scent from the herbs. A new unguent for the wound. 

“My masters made no distinctions,” she said as she measured and poured and mixed. But her eyes flicked to him, then away. The corner of her mouth turned upward so faintly it might have been shadow from the light. 

A promise of a smile. A hint of a woman’s pride. Jon settled easier into his chair, pleased, and guessed next, “So not all people of your house were trained in such a way. Your house must be less fearsome than men think it.”

It was an easy guess, a logical conclusion to it. The gentlest of teases. But it displeased her in some way. The archer stilled, and turned her back to him; her hand rose to her own face as if to ensure that her mask was still there, hiding her teeth, her luminous eyes. “Does it matter, Your Grace?” she asked, “How Faceless Men are trained?” and her voice was cool now, blank to him.

It hadn’t mattered, before. But like a cup balanced just so on a table edge before the hand pushed it, his thoughts tipped inevitably over. A fierce restlessness gripped him, until he had to lay his itching smarting hand upon his thigh, to keep his leg from jigging.

It _hadn’t_ mattered, before. But now he cast his mind back to the letter he had received, and what the Braavosi had promised him. Not their pretty trade terms, but of the bride. “The woman they sent,” he began, “the one you do not approve of—”

The archer was moving, with no care of him and the panic suddenly fluttering at his breast. She put a new rag into the bowl, wrung it, and turned to press it to his arm. She didn’t meet his eyes, as she said in a short, tight voice, “The one you do not _want_.”

Her gentleness had left her. She slapped the cloth to his arm, to the wound, a warning pain, a warning bite.

Jon didn’t want her. He couldn’t want her. He forced aside the half-formed idea, even as his own keen mind raced to complete the thought.

The archer was marvelous trained. A prince’s training, a queen’s. But even the most insistent of maesters and tutors and scholars couldn’t give someone a quick eye, the slyness needed for politicking, the arch cleverness needed for diplomacy. The boldness that would please a Northron people. The archer was well trained, but t’was her own spirit and manner that made up the rest. If the girl was even half as good as the archer—

It wouldn’t be a question of _half_. He knew how clever the girl was; he knew how clever the archer was. He knew it down to his bones. He shoved the thought away frantically, but it refused to leave him.

He made himself think of the girl. The girl, the half-formed idea of her, some Braavosi poor chit or else a transparent attempt by Braavos to rule the North.

Or else a carefully selected boon to Jon, for reasons yet unknown. He’d been aided before, by the Faceless Men, and still the price was yet unnamed. The Braavosi were strange and clever in ways he couldn’t understand. If the girl— 

It would be a fine thing to marry a woman such as that off to one of his lords. T’was regretful that Lord Manderly had no grandsons of an age.

“Is she trained in such ways as well?” he asked. It need be someone kept close to his court and someone of like sophistication. He could not see a Braavosi woman being pleased to wed a mountain Flint or a Norrey. If Cley Cerwyn had survived—

The Tallharts had living sons yet, Jon thought, and Lord Glover had several handsome nephews.

The archer said, dully, “It matters not, Your Grace,” but Jon heard the edge of her teeth, hiding under that mild tone.

The Braavosi were sly and clever in ways that Jon could not understand. The archer bent to Jon as he could not see her bending to another. In his mouth, the question, the thought, welled as bitter as blood on the tongue, but he didn’t let himself ask it.

“Think you such a woman could be happy in the North?” he asked instead, the words sticking and clinging to his throat, even as he forced them out. “We are a rougher country than she is used to.”

“I think,” the archer said darkly, and wiped so roughly at Jon’s wound that the shocked flash of pressure and pain made him yelp, “that I don’t wish to speak on this anymore.”

Jon made himself be quiet, instead of saying what he wanted, which ran to biting back at her. A sour demand to see her flinch, _What would you speak on, then? Since you are the one who will not leave me be. Since you don’t seem to want compromise between our people. Since you won’t tell me, truly, what you came here for and I cannot ask—_

He was not made so very green by her presence as to blurt out his mind like that. He glowered at the window instead. It was ill done of him to feel sullen, that nothing Jon said was able to please her, only set her on her back foot and her hackles to raising.

It was ill done to feel sullen that he wanted to please her. That he wanted to make her easy and see, finally, the smile she denied him.

Better he hadn’t said it, hadn’t asked. That way lay madness; that way lay betrayal; it was the path of nothing but unnecessary pain for them both.

He thought she would hold the silence between them. Certainly there was no sound but that made by her hands as she set the cloth aside, and bent to coax the needle through the candleflame until she could barely hold it with a hiss. It fell to the bowl when she dropped it, the water a shocked murmur at the heat, and she folded in the silk thread above it, leaving it to soak. 

But standing there above the bowl, she said in a low mutter, “You didn’t use a headsman.”

She knew of guest-right but not about that? “It’s not our way,” Jon said, trying to reclaim his patience. He kept forgetting, in the candlelight, in the way she touched him, in the scent of her and the almond trees, that she was a stranger yet.

“Should be,” the archer said a little sullenly herself as she fished her needle back out, “when someone’s chopped a piece out of your sword arm, Your Grace.”

“It would not be a matter at all if the maester was better at his craft,” Jon said back. That, at least, she could agree on!

His hopes of pleasing her struck true at last. She said, with great disgust toward the matter, “Would that you send him away and find m’lady a better one.”

“On the strength of one poor stitching job? Even if it’s a royal arm he’s mangled, the punishment seems in excess. A king must be more fair than that,” Jon told her, a little amused despite himself.

“On the strength of him being a fool,” she said back, and hotly. “M’lady’s pregnant and those maesters know as much about what a woman’s got between her legs as them septons do.”

It was the coarsest she had ever spoken to him and it made Jon bark out a laugh. She looked at him a second, from the corner of her eye, the candlelight giving the dull brown depth it didn’t have a moment before. “Laugh all you like,” the archer went on, light and insistent in the same breath as she began untangling the silk thread. “But m’lady’s better off with a midwife. Those Thenn ones seem to do alright.”

She didn’t seem to like questions. Still wanting for peace between then, Jon said, pointedly, “I won’t ask when you found the time to go among the Thenns, or why they haven’t marked you as a stranger yet.”

“They’re m’lady’s people,” she said, a quick flash of her eyes to his face. “I cannot just ignore them. And it’s a measure, a mark of a lady, how well she treats her smallfolk and not just her cousin the King.”

She seemed so serious about it. “You like her,” Jon said, and while her earlier regard of Sigorn sent his hackles to raising, now he felt unpleasantly pleased with the thought that the archer held Alys in high esteem.

She shrugged, turning away again. “I can give you milk of the poppy,” she said as she threaded the needle at last. “Before I start to it.”

“No,” and it did not seem to bother her as it had the maester; she only nodded and began.

She was quick about it and her hands steady. The pull of his flesh and the slide of the needle, the tense pain as she made the knot, was an easy rhythm. It felt as though she didn’t even touch him for true. In that moment, her hands were not made for touching anymore than a tool was made for touching. 

“The less the wound is handled, the less likely it is to putrefy,” she explained as she worked, standing just at the edge of Jon’s vision. “Less likely, too, that it will grow infected and give you blood sickness.”

And then, sounding sullen about it still, almost sounding sulky, “And despite what the fool maester told you, this arm needs rest. If I thought there even a little chance of you keeping it, I would put you in a sling.”

“It’s but a little wound,” Jon said back. “Hardly worth the fuss.”

The archer muttered mutinously, the needle a slow sickening drag through his flesh, “Aye, but I could change that for you, Your Grace. It would be the work of a second, if you won’t listen and _rest_ it.”

Jon turned his laugh, at the last moment, to a cough. He didn’t try and look at her again, remembering the unexpected touch and how both of them had frozen with it. He didn’t want to distract her, working as carefully as she did, and Jon little liked the thought of needing go back to the fool maester and explain the half-done work on his arm.

Too, there was an easiness to sitting there with her as she attended the matter, that small sweet shadow in the corner of his eye. Perhaps after, Jon thought to himself, he would ask her to pry the splinter from his palm and pour some of her salve over it.

The weirdwood splinter itched fiercely, dug deep into his hand. And above that, the low dull throb with each pull of the needle through his skin. The archer was silent now as she worked, her breath as steady as a sleeping man’s heartbeat.

Finally the last stitch was through and tied, and she put the bloody needle and the last length of thread into the basin and sighed, stretching her hands. 

He was free to look at her then, the candlelight glossing her cheeks and brow, her scarf knocked askew again and more wild hair escaping its edges. All her focus was on her own hands now, faintly smeared with his blood. She worked her fingers carefully.

“A cramp only,” she said to Jon’s curious look. “Three month since I have been with my masters and I am unused again to such fine work.”

Her face was different now, as she looked towards his arm again, her gaze as far-seeing as Alys’s own eyes had been that evening, just before she cried to Jon for justice. Jon didn’t much like it in the archer; she had left her masters and Jon was certain it must have been for good reason. She had left them, and they weren’t worthy of holding her regard any longer.

If she was there to see him, t’was him that she need see. “Mayhaps you should thank me for the practice,” he said easily, leaning back in his chair and making motion with his arm to test the range of the give.

Her eyes snapped back to his. “Mayhaps you should spend more time in the practice yard,” she flung back and slapped at his forearm when he reached forward. “Stop that, before you ruin all my hard work. Not even the most careful stitchery can keep silk from stressing and breaking if you abuse it so.”

“I’ll submit to your knowledge on the matter,” Jon told her, “as I never attended in my sewing lessons like you must have done.”

He quit the stretches, rolled his shoulder, and found himself pleased with the work. It would hold, he thought, through hunting the other two. “Will you bandage it?” he asked, looking back at the archer, and felt his mouth go dry at the look upon her face.

The mask was back upon her, thicker than he had seen it before. Funerary masks, he thought. Thick wax carefully shaped to form a face. “No, Your Grace,” she said, harsh, and put her back to him as she cleaned up after herself, quickly and neatly. 

“It needs drain,” she went on in a low, polite murmur, her hands stilling. “Tomorrow m’lady’s maester should wash it with vinegar again. But until then, wear a loose shirt if you might.”

His table was cleared in rapid order, and the dressing table set to neatness again. Jon turned a little to watch her as she worked and for a moment he caught Ghost’s brilliant eyes, where the wolf was still exiled in high sulk to his hearthrug, sullen and irate that the archer had no attention for him.

If Ghost knew what Jon had said wrong just yet, he gave no comment beyond a stern admonishment. 

_That is not being careful, Your Grace_ , Ghost’s wise red eyes seemed to say. He yawned, licking at his mouth. _I would not have made such a hash of it. She likes_ me _well enough_.

Jon’s irritation mounted a little. To speak to her was like trying to cross a bridge of brittle ice. The archer was now locking her box. But instead of turning herself back to Jon, she only hunched her shoulders a little, drew the candle closer, and began to look over his armor with, Jon thought, no doubt a critical eye.

Her performance of a servant now was much less amusing than it had been before. _Be my match_ , he burned to say, _or be my lesser. Don’t pretend that you can go between the two as you like when one or the other discomforts you_. “Just as you are not my chambermaid, you are not my squire,” Jon told her instead of speaking forth the words curdling on his tongue. “Leave those be.”

She was attending to his chestplate now, the greaves having met her satisfaction. “You have a rivet loose here,” she murmured in answer, touching the strap of the left shoulder.

“I will attend to it directly,” Jon said through his teeth. “Let it be, I beg you.”

The archer said back, “And the strap is worn. Does no one—” and the pitch of her voice, struggling to remain unaffected, only drove Jon further into his anger, “—take care of you?”

The archer might come into his quarters as if she owned them, and manage his evening that Jon was fed and watered, and she might see to his wounds. She might even make it seem as if she belonged there, the whole time she did it, but he could not let himself forget that she was in truth a stranger. 

That she was not for him. That he couldn’t have her, didn’t want her—

She struck him; he struck back before he could bite the words away.

“If this is some way of badgering me into accepting your masters’ _generous_ offer,” Jon snapped, “trying to tempt me with caretaking and sentiment—”

He did not finish. The archer said, back as straight as a board now and voice offended, “I said I do not wish to speak on that!”

“Then what _do_ you wish to speak on?” Jon demanded. His heart crashed inside his chest. “Since t’was you who invaded my life and will not let me be!”

Before he might’ve thought the words would make her flee, but she only set down his chestplate with an aggravated bang and said savagely, “And if you were less inclined to get yourself _killed_ over—”

She cut herself off with force. “No,” Jon said. The air between them seemed to scorch. He tasted blood, scented blood in that good way Ghost had while hunting, the way that came when his prey already strung at the leg. “No, you seem to have something to say. Go on, _my lady_. I am a fair man. I would hear it.”

“Never mind it,” she muttered at him. Jon caught her quick glance, from the corner of her eye, then traced the path of her looking as she turned her gaze towards the door.

He was tired of running. He was tired of chasing, of being alone in his hunting, of springing after something he couldn’t catch. It drove him; it drove the splinter deep into his hand as it turned into a fist without his leave; it drove his heart to mad and painful hammering inside his chest.

Jon rose from his chair and stood in her way. His blood was up now. He felt wolfish, eager. He felt that he might corner her at last, like he might fight her at last. 

“I’d hear it,” he said again, lower. “You didn’t come to me tonight just to tend my arm and see that I had my supper.”

The archer struggled a moment, trying to keep her mask in place; she bowed her head that Jon could not see her burning eyes. “It matters not, Your Grace,” she said but Jon was tired of not understanding things. 

He was tired of being judged with no recourse, of things being kept from him, of the archer keeping something from him. “You’ll tell me,” he said with the full command of a king and she looked up at him when he did.

He had no threat to back it, but he did not need one. He held the archer’s eyes for a heartbeat, two, and she said sullenly, “Why did you kill that man in the way that you did?”

Not, Jon thought, as his mind hinged upon the words, _why did you kill that man_. But why the _way_. The archer knew Jon would not use a headsman; ask her now about Jon killing him at all instead of sending him to his fiery death in the South?

It made no sense. The Braavosi had no fondness for dragons or dragonfire. And the archer’s own arrow had killed the other Lannister in a single clean blow.

“He was a Lannister soldier, and my prisoner besides,” Jon said. The archer needn’t know of his _own_ hesitance; it was not like she could pluck the thought from his face. Braavosi magics did not go so far. He shrugged, a slow roll of his shoulders, and it made the newly sewn cut on his arm ache a little. “Same as the man you killed, same as the man you helped me kill, and all of them war criminals. But I won’t consign even a man such at that to burning to death. What else would you have me do with him?”

She cocked her head to the side just a little, and the candlelight turned her bare neck to pale gold. Her motions were not coy, and only the worst of men, Jon knew, made themselves see regard returned when there was none. He fastened his eyes upon her face and kept them there. 

“Aye,” she said at last, and distantly, and set her own teeth into her bottom lip. 

“Aye,” Jon echoed back, but with little hope that the matter was done.

He was right; after a moment she said, with a little more irritation, “But why you? Why the block? Why the—”

Her mouth twisted like the taste of it offended her. “Why bring him into m’lady’s keep and make you both pretend at such niceties?” she demanded of him.

Jon could not see what she hoped to get from him, asking such things. It’d been trial enough for Jon, to see the thing done right. He didn’t want to stand there with her and debate it.

He wanted to lunge; he wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her. His whole body felt alive with the knowledge of a splinter in him, driven too deep to dig out, and the presence of it flared every time he turned his eyes to her face.

He kept his lips over his teeth but said hotly, “And what would you have me do? Slaughter him where he stood the second I found him? Stalk him and wait until it was dark to put an arrow in his back?”

“Yes!” the archer shouted and the cry of it filled the silence. Her eyes were fire now, a blaze much hotter than the candlelight that made glitter and colored them. “Yes, you ought to have struck him down where he stood! He was a Lannister soldier, a rapist and a thief and a murderer, no more and no less, and yet you treated him with such _honor_. As if he was your own guest!”

“I could have forgiven it,” she said, almost panting, “before you heard what he had done. But you did, you _did_ and yet you still—”

“He was my prisoner,” Jon snapped. Her tone was all recrimination; he refused to allow it to touch him. Refused to let it turn his thoughts to men with swords and little girls and blood, what those men _deserved_. “You know the ways of the North; you have presented to me your own knowledge of it well enough. You know that there was naught else I could do.”

It did not soothe her, to be reminded of this. “He was at Harrenhall!” the archer nearly howled, a raw and wounded sound. “You heard what he did, from his own mouth! What he did to those people!”

Her pain touched him yet, a full strike across his chest. But he had seen to the man; Jon had finished it, had forced the man to pay his crimes in gaudy spills and streaks of ruby blood.

He couldn’t bear such a rebuke, when he’d himself done nothing wrong.

“And he died for it!” Jon shouted back. Sweat slicked his body, under his clothes, and the hurried pound of his heartbeat lingered in his ears. “I took his miserable life from him; is that not payment enough for his crimes? He died for it, well and good, and now the matter is done.” 

Never mind those eyes, that had watched as Jon took the Lannister’s head. Never mind the thick unease that had clung to him ever since. It was not the archer’s business, that she only shouted Jon’s doubts back into his face.

“He died for it,” Jon said again. He made his shoulders loosen; he unclenched his hands and moved his weight back a little on his feet. He made himself, like hauling stones up a hill, slow and treacherous and aching work, calm. 

“What does it matter how I killed him?” he said, softer. “What do you care? Dead is dead, after all.”

“Dead is dead,” the archer agreed sullenly. “and so I should have killed the man when I had the chance. Dead is dead, so you cannot possibly object, if I’d poured you and your lords out a nice sweet hour of sleep, and taken the man away. It would have been better if I had. Slower,” and she was not sullen now, but deeply something else, something her wet eyes couldn’t hide. 

_Furious_ , and it fell over him, watching her eyes. And then the trembling curl of her mouth, and he thought, _or hurt_.

“Tried you,” he said so gently as to hide the danger, “and I would have taken your head next.” _It would have grieved me, but I would have done it all the same_ , and it made him more wroth, that there was truth in that horrible musing. 

“Those are the wrong ways, my lady,” he went on, curling his hand to a fist again and feeling the itch of the splinter burst and flower into pain. “We follow _Northron_ law here. Northron justice.”

In his mind’s eye, the swing of Ice in Eddard Stark’s steady hands. 

“We have honor,” Jon told her. 

In his mind’s eye, his own hands as he brought Longclaw down.

“We are not like you Braavosi who kill for pleasure or for coin. We follow the old ways, as all men should.”

In his mind’s eye, the Lannister’s mouth said _Be careful_ before it lost the chance to say anything ever again.

“You would not say that if you had been there,” the archer told him. Her mouth curled down further. “Killing him slow wouldn’t have been my pleasure. I wouldn’t enjoy doing it. But it would have been his due. No, you wouldn’t say that to me if you truly knew the matter. You heard his neat and pretty words, and it showed you nothing of the truth.” 

“Dying is not enough to pay for what he did to them, not by far! You would not say that if you’d _seen_ ,” she spat.

And under her words, the Lannister man’s voice, and Alys’ voice, and Eddard Stark’s voice.

 _Mercy, I beg you. I am not so important, just a soldier, just a man— I am not hungry for vengeance, I want justice. Lord Tywin gave us orders on how we need hold the castle, and I cannot say a single man didn’t follow them. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. I did, Your Grace, and lived to regret it. We could think of nothing else to do but follow blindly._

_The others were like me, cowards and men. That’s all._

_I could not leave him. Will you— when you find him, I beg you, be gentle. He did not understand and I could not leave him there to it._

_And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die._

He couldn’t bear it. Jon was so tired of ghosts and of the weight each lay upon him. He was tired of questioning his own heart, tired of seeing the blackness in other men’s hearts. It was easier to rage; easier to fight. To fasten his teeth on something and bear down until bone cracked.

“So say you after a scarce two days’ acquaintance,” Jon snapped back. “You know me no more than I know you. You have no idea what I’ve seen. We are strangers, nothing more, and I beg you not to forget it.”

Her face was made for flinching. She flinched back then and her mouth trembled, just a little. If there was light in her eyes, the wind of his words smothered it. It died wetly, that luminous black glossed with sudden tears.

Jon wished he could have swallowed his words back. Not the moment he said them, because it felt good to bite, even if it was not what he wished to be biting, but after, as she turned her eyes away.

He wanted her eyes back on him. His heart crashed and pounded and ached.

The silence came and hung thick and heavy between them. Jon knew he’d trespassed. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that might fix it.

He wanted to say, though he did not know why, _I did not mean it_. Or perhaps, _Please._

Before he could, she turned back to the dressing table, picked up her box, and tucked it better to carry under her arm. 

“You’re leaving,” and the words fell stupidly from his mouth. No one, not even the archer, would stand still and let someone wound them.

She did not deign to give him her eyes again, looking instead at the floor. “I have nothing left to say to you, if you won’t listen,” she murmured, her mask back firmly in its place, her whole face like a dead woman’s, betraying no liveliness or emotion. 

“What of the others?” Jon demanded. “The other Lannisters.” Instinct cried and thrilled. If she left now, she would disappear as surely as a shadow on a moonless night. If she left now, he wouldn’t have a chance to see her again.

She was quick, but he thought he could be quicker, shifting his weight to better move if she tried to pass him. “Have you nothing to say on that?” he rasped out, almost panicked. “You are hunting them still, are you not?”

“The wroth one,” she said, still looking away. “Your prisoner was useful to me, at least, no matter that he didn’t give me satisfaction. I cannot track a man whose mind is so foreign to me, but now I know what drives him? I can find this other quick enough.”

Jon remembered the Lannister’s last words. _His blood made him mad as his father’s dogs and the war made him worse_ , that dead mouth whispered. 

Jon felt the sudden chill of it as he hadn’t before. The archer was sly and clever, but she was also bold. It would take boldness, to go hunting alone for such a man. 

He would not have her boldness be what killed her.

“The man is mad,” he said. “You can track him, I do not doubt that, but he shares the Clegane blood. Better you leave him to me, that we might go at him with a dozen men and spears to catch him and chain him again.”

“He isn’t,” she said mildly, politely. Maddeningly.

Jon snorted and raked his hands through his hair, the burnt one dully aching. “Isn’t what? Mad? You said yourself—”

“I said he was _wroth_ ,” the archer chided, still in that same mild voice, like the sweetest of septas. Like she didn’t care at all that t’was Jon she spoke to, or a Lannister that she spoke about. “And he is. Wroth and poisoned in the mind, but not by any blood. It’s war and his lords letting him do to people as he liked, that turned him to what he is. But that is not madness, Your Grace.” 

Her flat brown eyes went to his. “It’s a choice, to act in such a way,” she said. “And only a sane man would make it. I will have little enough trouble with him.” 

“You would ignore the advice of the man who knew him?” Jon demanded. He felt ill at the thought of them meeting; it was all too easy to picture her body rent beyond repair. “You would just pretend that the Lannister didn’t say it was so? Cleganes are dangerous. If you’ve heard of Haarenhal, you must have heard of the Mountain—”

“It’s not blood that makes men act in such a way!” the archer snapped. She tossed her head like a horse and glared at him. “His blood doesn’t make a man any more than his bile or phlegm does. A man’s raising makes him, and his life, and his people.”

She swallowed, a wet pained sound. “Blood won’t make a man into a monster,” she insisted. 

“It’s a deep illness that does it, that they know they will be allowed to do whatever they like. You would know it if you had gone to war _for true_. It touches every man after battle when his blood is high and he feels dangerous. When he feels his freedom lies in his steel and how he uses it. It makes him think he is unbeholden to anything.”

“And then his lord says to him, are these smallfolk not the people of our enemy? And so they’re our enemies as well. Your holy vows, your duties as a knight and man, they don’t matter to your enemies. Is it not right, not just, to punish them for their crimes?”

And a man, Jon knew, was raised to listen to his lord above all else.

“And so the smallfolk pay for their lords’ greed and war-making and ambitions,” she said as gently as if he were a child. “They pay in blood. The _permission_ to take that evil coin is what makes a man like Broadhill. If all the lords say it must be so, then it must. If those kings say it must be so, it must! And the more he takes, the less he cares about the slaughter, until someday he comes to like it. That’s the lesson every soldier learns. That _you_ would have learned.”

Her words were like a cut. His hand throbbed painfully. He couldn’t think on it, how firmly and surely she spoke. 

A cornered wolf didn’t think. It bit instead. 

“If I had never gone to war,” Jon said low and dark, “you would not be here. None of us would be here.”

She looked at him a moment, then dipped a curtsy. Her mouth was a thin pale line. There was a smear of Jon’s own blood just there, across her nose, where she had wiped her face with the same hand that had stitched him. 

“Pardons, Your Grace,” she said. Perhaps the apology in her voice was even true. “I did misspeak. But your war was different. Those men fighting it could play at still being virtuous and fair, fighting such enemies as you did.”

“War is war,” Jon said back. He thought he might be ill. His gorge rose high in his throat. He _hadn’t_ been with Robb, though he should have. He hadn’t seen. “If you would malign my men, then do it for true, less I think you a coward as well as a fool.”

The archer didn’t lay and take his harsh words. She lifted her chin, eyes flashing. “Fine,” she snapped. “Fine. You wish to speak to truths? T’was not the lions who only had hold of Harrenhall, that grievous place! There was a Faceless Man there, who well saw the war. It was honor for the wolves and pride for the lions, and death or worse for everyone else!”

“It’s the way with all war,” the archer cried. “To be fought in such a way, and the captives ransomed, and the knights gone home and nothing left for those who suffered it the most! No grain in their barns and bastards raped into their bellies, husbands and brothers and wives and sisters lying dead, and no justice! There is no justice in this whole damned world, and I might have—”

Her voice broke. She stopped, breathing hard, her chest heaving. He thought for a moment that she might sob, and the ache of his hand became an ache to reach for her, to touch her and draw her close and comfort her.

And then as Jon watched, she calmed herself, folded herself away to fit back under that mask she favored so. “I thought you would give the man justice,” she whispered, a child’s voice, “but to you who never saw, dead is dead.”

It wasn’t fair. Nothing in the world was fair, not for anyone. He grit his teeth but she did not give him the chance to speak.

“The only difference in _your_ war, Your Grace, the only thing to keep it from being so, was that the enemy had no women to be rape, no children to be struck down, no fields to be burn. They were not men, they did not fight as men, and your armies did not see them as men. But if they were, if they _had_ , it would have been like the rest.”

“No,” Jon said, and he could not believe it. Couldn’t believe that she thought he was so hardened he couldn’t hear what she was saying, nor that she thought he would have let his men, his army, his soldiers do such things. “No,” and the fury rose in him. “It wouldn’t have been the same!”

“And why is that?” the archer demanded of him. “Did the ice leach all familiar thoughts from your soldiers’ brains? Were they gelded before battle, that they might all fight as the Unsullied did? What would have kept them from doing these things as they had done before?”

“I would have!” he snarled. But she only dipped her chin, a bare nod.

“One man against a thousand thousand,” she said with sickly false musing. “It is brave of you to say, but you would have died in the attempt.”

“I am their king!” Jon barked back, hazarding a step towards her. “Those lords that placed me on the Winter Throne, they did not pick a weatherturn from atop some distant barn. I do not go inconsistently! They would listen to me, and bend their wills, or I would _make_ them. Their honor is my honor, and I have seen my honor blackened enough.”

“Robb Stark had honor, they say,” and her face was perfect blankness. “There was a Faceless Man at Harrenhall, Your Grace, who saw it true. Do not question my brother. The reign of the wolf is no more gentle or good than the reign of the lion.”

“I am not my own brother. And I am not my father, or his father, or any of them!” Jon shouted. It burst from him like pus from a deep and ugly wound. The words tore at his throat; it was all he could do not to scream them. 

“Speak you still on what they’ve done, but look, damn you! Look at what I have done! You rode from the far north. You must have passed the Night’s Watch castles, the Gift, Last Hearth. Are my people not well-tended? From lord to the smallest of the smallfolk, do any cry and starve and bleed their hearts’ blood into the earth, for want of some other man’s ugly whims?”

For a long moment, the archer was still. “Look you at the Lannisters,” Jon pressed, his heart hammering madly. “And how I treated them, how I will treat them. Was I not honorable even with my enemies?”

“Yes,” the archer agreed. “Most honorable, when they did not _deserve it_.”

“I will not have cruelty here,” he said, “or greed, or the ugliness that those lords let flower and root in the South.” And it was a child’s begging from his mouth. He needed her to see it. He couldn’t say _why_ , only that he did, and it tore at him. But the words felt untrue in his mouth, and the archer did not change her face at all, still a soft blank mask.

“You said it was a choice,” Jon told her. “Aye, fine, so it is. And I choose not to let my people behave in such a way, or wrought such evil in these lands.”

“A fine choice,” the archer murmured. “Would that it was that easy.”

“Aye,” he said, and they stood there a moment. Ghost, in their shouting, had shifted to his feet. Now he came to stand by the archer’s side. Now she set her box on the table again and sank her hands into Ghost’s fur.

He would not let it be so, Jon told himself. The archer had spoken so passionately, so achingly. There had been a Faceless Man at Harrenhall; now came this archer familiar with Northron custom, who could turn herself to a ghost when she stood as a serving woman, as a servant. 

Who spoke with tears in her eyes of the Five Kings’ War. Jon couldn’t ignore it or refuse it, just because it made him ill. If he did, he would be no better than the rest. 

No, the idea of what she said needed thought. It _deserved_ thought, deserved his full attentions. After the Lannisters were gone, and he might allot more time to her words—

After the Lannisters were gone, this Broadhill especially. Broadhill, and Jon could better understand now why the archer wanted to pursue him. But with the thought of her small body measured against a man such as that, further sweat out upon his body. It couldn’t be borne. Jon could not bear it, not even the smallest chance that she might fall to a man such as that.

He had no name to hail her by, no title he could lay upon her that would not be rebuffed. “Choices,” Jon said softly, his heart hammering, and waited until she looked up at him.

Her eyes were dry now and her mouth lax.

“It’s a choice, to hunt Broadhill by yourself,” he said. “And I beg you, make another. He is dangerous and I would not see you hurt by him when others might better make the pursuit.”

She shook her head. “I chose to come here, knowing there would be danger in it,” she murmured, “if not knowing the danger would be this. If I am wounded, or if I am killed—”

“You won’t be,” Jon said and it burst from him. He did not want her; he could not want her, and better than he didn’t. But he couldn’t make himself unfeeling to her, to her safety, when it was a king’s duty to keep everyone safe. 

Only one name could hinder him in that. _Arya_ , and his duty bent itself in the face of her name every time. But she wasn’t here. He should have prayed before, at the base of the weirwood. He should have knelt and begged, _You gods keep her safe until you bring her back to me. Keep her safe in a world where men like Broadhill exist._

He couldn’t help Arya, wherever she was, and the thought of it unmanned him every time. But the archer was here, just before him, and Jon could at least ensure that he kept his sword between _her_ and any dangers. He wouldn’t let the archer be killed.

To buy himself time, to try and think of a way to deter her, stubborn as she was, he blurt, “You came here wary of danger? What danger could the North hold for you?”

But she only shook her head. “Why come at all?” Jon pressed. “If t’was just to see, you would have left that first night.” Anything to get her speaking, even if it angered her. He only needed time.

But she didn’t make to leave, didn’t even take her hands from Ghost’s shaggy head. The night had loosed her tongue, or the fight between them, or the looming possibility of her own death. “I didn’t approve of my masters’ scheme,” she murmured. “Nor could I stop the matter. I thought you would not want her. I knew you wouldn’t—” 

She paused and took in a slow even breath. “But I still had to come and see. Just in case. You chose your lords and retainers too well, Your Grace. None of them have the loose lips of those Southron men, not even when I greased them well with women and wine. None would tell me what kind of man you are, beyond the endless listing of your virtues. The lucky bride might learn those on her own, but I needed think elsewise.” 

“How so?” Jon croaked. His mind turned and turned; his fear for her warred for room beside his earlier suspicions. He could not command her to stay behind, or trap her in some way. Nor would his words turn her from her prey. 

He couldn’t bear to hear it if she laid before him the truth that he suspected. That t’was her, sent—

“I needed think towards your vices,” the archer told him. The corner of her mouth crooked up, but it was no more a smile than a pony was a dragon. “If you gamble or go whoring,” she went on, “or beat your horses or your hounds. I could not— Women wed for life, Your Grace, and I knew you would not want her, that everyone said you waited for another, but I could not take the risk.” 

He wished he had better attended before. He wished he had never supposed she was there for anything else. His face was flushed, but he could not bring himself to anger. “The world knows little about Jon Targaryen, Your Grace,” the archer said, almost embarrassed. Almost apologetic.

“Jon Stark,” he said back, old habit. His gathered thoughts, how to deter her hunting, fell away. T’was him that she had come to see, for true. But not for herself, not from her own desires. 

That made it worse. It was easier to feel pity; she must have known the hapless woman sent to wed Jon. The archer must mourn the loss of the crown her friend would not wear, or the loss of her company to a land and a stranger so far away. 

During the war, the Faceless men had all called each other brother. My brother this and my brother that; if she knew the girl— 

They were the same, at least a little. Even now. Jon could understand loving your sister beyond reason, beyond thought, beyond sense.

If it was Arya, offered so haplessly to some stranger—

It _had_ been Arya, or so Jon had thought. He rubbed his hand to his chest, where the scars were, and hissed at the sudden unexpected pain. The splinter, he remembered a moment too late.

He made himself put away the small disappointment. He’d gotten an idea from it, at the least. And if the girl was wed to one of his lords, kept close that she might advise Jon—

If t’was him, he would not leave Arya alone in some foreign court. The archer might stay near, lingering in some disguise. She might come and perch on his windowsill some nights, and help make the waiting less lonely.

“Would it not be better to ride with me then?” he asked, his voice light so she knew there was no offense. “I will ask one of my guards to remain behind, and you might take a man’s face. In a known helm it would be difficult to tell, and you would have time to better learn me, for your sister’s sake, than if you went after Broadhill alone—”

Would that he could keep his foot from his mouth, for even the space of a single visit with her! The archer’s face changed, all emotion sliding from it, erasing all quiet confession over her purpose there. Plastering heavy wax over the way she’d searched his face, embarrassed and sincere. She said, “I do not want him near you. To speak more on it, Your Grace, would be to waste time and breathe.”

“So you would risk your own life, hunting him alone!” Jon cried. “For what, justice? Know me in this; I will give him justice.”

Never had there been one to make him so wroth. She did not yield, not even a little. “Trust me in this,” Jon pleaded. “I am a stranger, but can you not trust me even a little?”

Her face was soft and blank, but her eyes were blazing. She shook her head and told him, “Better my life and my justice than yours. I will not have him near you, not when the danger is so great. Tomorrow, when I have found him, when it is dark and he has his back to me, I will put an arrow in it and spare us both any grief in the matter.”

Would that she listened! Jon’s mouth was flush with blood, his body flooded with anger. He wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her.

“Stay away from him,” Jon said. The archer was _his_ , his quarry, it was him she had come in the night to see, and she was not to be touched by Lannister hands. He wouldn’t have it. He wouldn’t bear it. She was not to fall to a Lannister sword.

“So he can have justice done to him?” the archer asked. “So you can swing your sword and make him so honorably dead? I have seen the South’s idea of justice, and I have seen the North’s. Yours is cleaner, Your Grace. I want to believe you when you say there is honor in it. But some men do not deserve honor, not when it is dangerous to give it to them.” 

She drew in a deep slow breath, and added, fiercely, “And too I am not so unselfish. I trust you to make him dead, Your Grace. But I cannot trust you that he will pay back his full blood-price before he falls.” 

She took her hand from Ghost’s head and touched it a moment to her box again. “And too,” she told him like it was pulled from her, “I do not want him near you.”

“You have no right,” Jon said, his heart crashing and pounding in his chest. His hand was a fist. He wanted to jerk the archer closer and say it to the shell of her ear, hold her there near the threat of his teeth until she understood. He wanted it; he was sick with the desire to make her understand. That it would ruin something in him, to find her body. That it would make something in him unrecoverably wild. 

It made him wroth, her presumption and his own _want_ for it, that she keep presuming.

“You have no right to protect me,” he spat, bristling, “or try and dictate the course of my hunts. Stay away from him, my lady. I mean it.”

She shook her head, a single soft turn, and her thin hair slid across her neck. Ghost was still sat at her side; his wise red eyes turned between her and Jon where Jon stood trembling with outrage. He could not see what they said, Ghost’s eyes. The blood in Jon’s mouth was his own doing. Those eyes could have said anything.

“ _He_ wants to kill you, now he knows you’re here,” the archer pressed in her soft gentle voice. It was a mask as much as her mousy face; it hid something Jon could not name. It hung in her voice, that unknowing thing. It hung in the air, as thick as scent between them, Jon’s own blood and her long-dried sweat and something else, something far and faint and familar and good. “The others didn’t, but he will. Can you not understand that? He’ll try to kill you and he’ll keep trying.”

She’d shown him the needle-sharp edge of her teeth; she’d coated her hands in his blood; she’d nearly wept before him. She’d shown him her own heart, distant and tender and lost, same as his. What else, Jon thought, had she to hide?

“He won’t think,” she went on. “He can’t. You make yourself blind to it purposefully, Your Grace. He’s lost everything and now he just wants to see something brought to ruin. What justice can you give him for that? He needs a sword swing no more than a feral dog does. I will fill him with arrows, and make him say their names, all he remembers, before he dies. It won’t be as quick, but there will be no chance of biting.”

The Braavosi were sly and clever in ways that Jon could not understand. The quarry before him now was lions; he had lost sight of the far quarry. Jon had forgotten and he could not afford to let himself forget.

Her words were like arrows in his flesh; it knocked him back into his good sense. She didn’t know if he was a good match for her sister, could not speak to his vices, whatever and however dangerous as they may be, but duty and love bade her still to keep the option open, that he might be a good fit. 

“He’s lost everything. He wants to see something brought to ruin,” Jon said back, a faint echo of her voice. The words caught at his ears and hung in his mind. A rough-sewn tabard, one that could fit many a man, not just the Lannister.

Had Jon not felt the same? He’d torn Ramsay Snow to pieces, he’d left Melisandre alive, left to her start the burnings. He’d cut down the dead in endless waves and worn the gore of it as a noblewoman might wear her jewels and still it hadn’t slaked at all the terrible wrath and pain gathered tight behind his ribs, where his heart should have been.

He’d send those men with their red clothes all stained and worn and faded far to grey, south to die with little care for them. He’d sent them to burn, his own allies, that he needn’t trouble himself with looking into their eyes and hearing their final words. And never once afterwards, never until now, had Jon considered the cost of the damage they’d done and how they should’ve been made to pay it. 

And he’d risked an alliance the North could little afford to lose. What a clever way to castigate Jon, to try and make him see the Braavosi’s views.

Was that not their thoughts towards him? That Jon had lost everything and would see their alliance brought to ruin just for the pleasure of the burning fires when it did? “I can understand that,” he said harshly. He did not like, but he saw the archer now, her little mousy face and the threat she could hide behind her words. Wolves, too, bit when they were cornered.

They might have been kin, a wolf and whatever sharp-toothed thing she hid under her mask.

Her look to him now was hidden in that same flatness. Her voice was dull. “I doubt it,” she said. “You’re king. What’ve you ever lost, that you’d see the world burn for it?”

She did not give him a chance to stop her, only left her box where it was and slipped past him, clung close to the wall. And then she was gone, the door shut softly behind her.

Ghost made no move to follow. Instead, he crept to Jon’s side, where he should have been all along, and pressed his face to Jon’s hands.

Jon didn’t think of the wooden wolf until he stroked down Ghost’s neck. They’d wounded each other so deeply, he and the archer, that it might’ve been her own blood that coated his teeth now, until he felt like he was sucking on a handful of coins.

Surely her own teeth were just as wetly red. With that between them, what did a scrap of wood matter?

But she kept it, still. The archer was sly and clever and bold, and she was not a thief. His burnt hand withdrew the Lannister cloth from his pocket. It was a poor substitution for the little wooden Nymeria with her amber eyes. Had the archer sought to even things between them? Or else predicted that Jon would need her careful clever hands again?

T’was not payment anymore, only fair trade between them. She had left the box. They were both bloody with new wounds. Their business with each other—his and the archer’s—wasn’t done. He would speak with her again.

But until then, Jon thought, and his hand closed the cloth into his fist. Until then, Broadhill. The splinter in his palm pressed sharp and hot as a knife to his soft flesh. You could hate a man as you killed him, and twice as much if he was a man such as that, but what did hate matter after the sword came down? What did it matter if it was a sword at all?

What could the sword give you, beyond a dead man to hate? Safety, with Broadhill at least. And in his mind, the Lannister’s mouth said, _Be careful_. His last words, and a warning such as that, to fully impress the danger on the man standing, ready, waiting to kill him.

He wasn’t a danger. Jon could well have let him live. Taken some other unthought-of payment from him for his crimes.

But the thought of turning from it, from their ways, his father’s ways, made him feel ill. He couldn’t be easy with the memory of the sword-swing. Too, he couldn’t soften, he couldn’t thaw. Jon knew no other way; if he turned now, he would be lost.

It didn’t matter if the Braavosi pitied Jon or hated him. It didn’t matter if the archer felt sympathy for him. They would try and trap him anyway, try to force him into the one thing he couldn’t do. Could they all be as stubborn as the archer? To force them to change their views on the matter would be like trying to turn the course of a river with only his own hands.

Jon would deny them, always, but there was danger in that too.

Arya, when she was small and wild and sweet, Arya when she was still his, had been stubborn; she hadn’t listened to anyone’s words and warnings. She’d had such a wild heart that to deny her anything was to make it her only desire.

What did the archer desire? He knew why she’d come, but now that she was here, what kept her circling Jon, watching him, sliding close and then pulling away? What did she want, to tarry so?

The night, the tiredness, the sword-swing, and the fight dragged at him until it was all Jon could do to stagger across the room and sink onto the edge of the bed. Ghost followed, tight at his heels, and rested his head across Jon’s knees.

The archer burned to kill Broadhill and see her justice done, but she could have gained that from the shadows, without even a glance in Jon’s direction. She was quick and deadly; any man standing across her bow-sights would die if she wished it. 

And Jon didn’t think her desires were so simple as to be just this: keeping Jon far from Broadhill, and watching Jon closely, and deciding if he was even worthy of that promised Braavosi bride. Whatever she _wanted_ , and she need want something, she kept the knowledge to herself alone.

There was danger in that, too. The loneliness. The archer was small and quiet and quick but even wolves did not hunt alone. This man was a feral dog, and Jon had killed those before, nine of them and each more vicious than the last. He still lived, that his men had stood guard at his back and sides as he did the filthy work.

He and the archer, they were the same, at least a little. But he could not wager on her life, that they were much the same as that. The archer hunted _alone_.

A wolf didn’t hunt alone. Was the archer a wolf, under her mousy little face and those flat brown eyes? Jon wanted, dizzily, to see the true teeth she kept hidden, but he did not want to see them buried in Lannister flesh and fouled with Lannister blood.

He didn’t want to see them broken and blood in a mouth made silent.

Ghost bathed Jon’s hands in long slow licks. His mouth was danger and comfort both. The surprise of it, those long wet touches, made Jon’s fingers relax and he let the cloth fall to the floor. “Aye,” Jon murmured, flexing his fingers and feeling new pain blossom.

He looked at his palm, and in the wavering candlelight, pulled the weirwood shard free. White wood, pink with his own blood, straight and deadly as the archer’s own arrows had been. 

“Aye, wolf,” he said as Ghost licked away the thin rivulet of blood and turned to nose at the wood. “She’s gone for sure, but she’ll come again. And until then, we are hunting.”

When Jon laid himself down to sleep, he didn’t even think of dreaming. But he did, and it was no Spring dream with sweet grey eyes. Sleep betrayed him. The body under him was soft and warm and lean. It begged in a quiet husky voice and thrashed and moaned when Jon put his teeth to that white neck. It was a slow hot stirring dream and he woke up still tasting the blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's here! It's finally here! After, what an entire month? Month and some change? I am so deeply sorry for the wait, but I hope an entire chapter of just the world's longest conversation makes up for it!
> 
> A thousand million thanks to everyone who send me good vibes and well wishes! And also everyone who's commented, kudos'd, subscribed, bookmarked, and read this so far! You guys rock, and I love you all so much. It's a lot easier to keep writing and editing this fic knowing that people out there have/are going to read and enjoy it. 
> 
> Chapter Five is going to be a slog for me, since my entire first draft of it contains multiple two-sentences such as "They went to the place and did a thing. Fill this in later." But! I promise no matter how long it takes, I'm trying my hardest to write an interesting and tense chapter full of all kinds of good things. I don't know when it's going up, but it _will_ go up, never fear!
> 
> As always, you can talk to me here, or email me (ao3throwaway27@gmail.com), or come chat with me about anything at all, but especially Jonrya [on tumblr](https://mysticalmuddle.tumblr.com/). Love you guys so much and I hope you enjoy this chapter!! <33333


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